What is Burnout?
Category: Idea | Posted date: 2021-11-24 01:25:44 | Updated date: 2021-11-24 01:52:04 | Posted by: Admin
What and where is the perfect place to work? Aspects like your colleagues, office equipment, environment and company position can be a great factor to your work outcome. But, there is one thing that stands out the most -- your mindset.
As cliche as it sounds, your mindset defines your perspective in life, thus, how you react, greatly affects how you work, too. For some reason, burnout can be inevitable. Because at some point in our careers, we feel stressed and overwhelmed that could end up losing interest in what we do.
Question is, what could be the core reason? The work itself or the workers ourselves?
Let us first discuss briefly what burnout is and how it affects our minds.
The World Health Organization classifies it as an “Occupational Phenomenon”, although not classified as a medical condition or illness, it is still treated with great measure and attention as the majority of the world’s population are employed - there are now over 3 billion people as recorded in world’s employment rate. This makes it prone to burnout. Also defined in ICD-11 as a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. It affects our minds in a negative way. It is proven to reduce productivity and efficiency within one's workplace.
It would be obviously tricky to ask how this burnout can be prevented as people with experiences have different versions of burnout. This could sometimes depend on…
Emotional Contagion
It is the general experience within a workplace. This could be considered as an internal factor, meaning, results are related to company rules, workflow and its people. Most commonly known examples of this are:
Feedbacks
- What’s more motivating than a company that cheers and recognizes their employees’ achievement -- big or small? As an employee, admit it or not, feedback has a great impact on our productivity. Bad feedback could either bring us down or learn a lesson from it. Apparently, either way, burnout can still find a way to disrupt.
Peer Pressure
- If you are working alone, this is probably not a big deal, but for companies with groups of people working together, peer pressure is definitely on top of the list. Its influence can be direct or indirect, also known as “mimicry”. If directly, we chose to be influenced by others' gestures or emotions. Our judgment could be the one to blame for this, as it could directly affect our work quality. To be influenced indirectly, not having awareness is a sign of how your workplace can be a powerful influence on you. Adapting unconsciously may result in confusion and working uncomfortably.
Rules
- It may or may not directly affect the quality of an individual's work, but for what it’s worth, it sets ground rules. But for some, it doesn’t always sit right. Contradictions could arise between the rules and one’s type of job or workload. Correct applicabilities and considerations must play a great part in this, it gives the employee much more flexibility and freedom that is proven to result in high quality outcomes, loyalty, and upbeat personality.
External Responsibilities
- Employees also have responsibilities outside of work, given whatever those are, it becomes instinctive for us to have to carry them even in our work. Some might say that this is being unprofessional, getting caught in between job and personal life. That is the complication for some of us, we sometimes find it hard to keep the balance in between and lose our focus. These are mostly due to financial and family responsibilities or an intrapersonal responsibility like confidence. A light workload can feel heavy in times of stress and panic.
So if we go back to the question, what could be the core reason for burnout? The work itself or the workers ourselves? Then, it would be us - our mindsets. We are not ignoring here the fact that the causes mentioned above are the ones who feed our minds to feel burnt out, but how we respond to them will not just prevent it but also we’ll learn how to manage because burnouts come and go, could be at unexpected times where our guards are down.
Burnouts may be an unclassified medical condition, however, our mental health is not a joke. With people having different levels of emotional states, a little sign of burnout could end up severe for some people. It is okay to take a break, say “no” and prioritize your mental health.
Sources:
WHO - https://tinyurl.com/3bujvdp2
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1258612/global-employment-figures/
