My story
I have gone through burnout myself, and it was extreme burnout. I also went through compassion fatigue, which is a little bit different. It has to do with repeat exposure to people in traumatic situations. You often see compassion fatigue in healthcare and nonprofits where people support suffering people.
My passion is organizational culture through a grid of burnout prevention. My work has been featured on CTV News, CHCH, Morning Live, Thrive Global, the University of Toronto Faculty of Medicine, as well as many other outlets.
The Burnout Assessment I developed is used across sectors globally. I’ve personally worked with organizations across industries, including healthcare, corporate, nonprofits, municipalities, universities, and faith-based organizations. Many of these organizations use the Burnout Assessment company-wide.
Healthy organizations support employee wellness because healthy employees create healthy organizations
When it comes to preventing employee burnout, organizational culture is the place to start because happy, healthy employees create healthy organizations that thrive.
Research shows that six factors consistently generate workplace burnout and negatively affect organizational culture. They are an overwhelming workload, a lack of control, a lack of reward, a lack of connection, a lack of fairness, and conflicting values.
Whenever we ensure employees’ workloads are positive, assure they have control and autonomy over their work, help them feel rewarded, feel connected to one another, and experience fairness, burnout decreases dramatically. And when people's personal values align well with your organization's mission, vision, and values, employees flourish much more easily.
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Learn how to implement the Burnout Assessment across your organization.
Why use the Burnout Assessment in your organization?
1. Effective and research-based
The burnout assessment is an effective tool for measuring employee burnout risk within your organization. It is evidence-based on the foremost research on burnout.
2. Diversity, equity and inclusion
This is the only burnout assessment I'm aware of that includes questions related to diversity, equity and inclusion. That's so important because it makes a significant difference to organizational culture.
3. Get to the root of the problem and provide practical solutions
As you evaluate your employees using the burnout assessment, you’ll learn what causes your employees their most significant stress. Then, you can implement effective measures.
Human Resources professionals and C-level executives often tell me they’ve worked hard to roll out new initiatives with employees, but employees don’t utilize them. The burnout assessment reveals where problems exist so you can provide effective solutions that employees engage. The assessment positively impacts employee well-being and increases productivity as you address the real issues. In addition, it helps you to prevent costly leaves of absence, resignations and termination by stopping burnout before it happens. And in the end, that saves money.
4. Essential questions uncover relevant information
The burnout assessment provides the first step for opening the conversation with employees about burnout. It offers essential questions, so you get relevant data.
5. A personal and professional profile
This is the only burnout assessment containing both a professional and personal profile. The professional profile includes six categories based on the factors that generate burnout in the workplace. They are workload, control, reward, community, fairness and values.
The personal profile consists of five categories: physical health, mental, emotional, spiritual and relational health.
Most organizations choose to evaluate based on the professional profile only. Having said that, the number one reason people resign from their job and seek help is that they no longer have time or energy for their families. The personal profile is critically important for that reason. Also, many nonprofits and faith-based organizations use the personal profile with employees. It's entirely appropriate, and they find it useful for helping employees stay healthy.
A process for using the Burnout Assessment in your company
1. Communicate
Explain the purpose of asking employees to complete the assessment. Communicate that you care about their health and well-being and want them to thrive. Send the downloaded burnout assessment PDF or a direct link to your team and direct reports. Instructions are included.
Based on your company’s culture, encourage employees to complete the entire burnout assessment but let them know they will only self-disclose the professional profile. If you’re part of a nonprofit or faith-based organization, feel free to use the personal profile as well.
2. Evaluate
The first time you use the burnout assessment, ask employees to self-evaluate and come prepared to talk about what they discovered. This builds psychological safety with your direct reports.
The second time you evaluate, or if you have a very healthy culture, ask for a completed copy of the assessment.
3. Ask questions
Open the conversation by asking questions like: What did you notice? Do you have any concerns? What changes would help you? This allows the employee to talk about what's going on for them. Open-ended questions are most effective.
Ask what support and resources they would like. Often people know what they need but are afraid to ask.
Recommend resources your organization provides. Are there bench benchmarks, workflows, and automation tools that would help them flourish? Do they have access to an employee assistance program, a benefits package, mental health, and vacation days? Remind them that these resources are available and can be accessed anonymously.
4. Use ongoing
Many companies use the burnout assessment ongoing within their management structure quarterly and as part of their annual three-sixty review process.
5. Collect and analyze data
Over time, you’ll see where your direct reports typically struggle. You'll notice themes and patterns. It reveals the gaps across the larger organization. Then, you can fill those gaps by creating initiatives that work.
For instance, if everybody in a particular department consistently seems to have challenges in two categories, that’s where your focus needs to go.
If you wish to go a step further, create a system to catalogue assessment results across your organization, noting which of the six categories needs improvement.
Burnout prevention workshop
In this workshop, we lead organizations through the six factors that create burnout and affect organizational culture. We begin by defining each factor and providing examples of how it plays out in your industry.
Then, we facilitate discussions around how each of the six factors may play out in your workplace. It's incredible, because we see people collaborate and reach a consensus. Then we facilitate groups to collectively create working models to deal with the factors causing workplace challenges. We facilitate real change in the organization’s health.
This matters because happy, healthy employees create healthy organizations that thrive.
About the author
Bonita Eby is a Burnout Prevention & Organizational Culture Consultant, Executive Coach, and owner of Breakthrough Personal & Professional Development Inc., specializing in burnout prevention and wellness for organizations and individuals. Bonita is on a mission to end burnout. Get your free Burnout Assessment today.
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