HBR: Are You Responsible for You and Your Team's Burnout? February 24, 2020
Written by MSDC staff
A new article in the Harvard Business Review asks the question - are leaders now responsible for building a culture of preventing burnout?
The article addresses burnout as a whole and does not focus on the medical profession. It uses the World Health Organization's (WHO) addition of burnout in the ICD-11 and subsequent clarification of burnout as an occupational phenomenon to explore how to best address the condition.
The article points to Christina Maslach's research and a recent Gallup survey on workplace burnout. According to the survey, the top five reasons for workplace burnout are:
They are healthy birds, singing away as they make their way into the cave. But, when they come out full of soot and disease, no longer singing, can you imagine us asking why the canaries made themselves sick? No, because the answer would be obvious: the coal mine is making the birds sick.
The article goes on to describe how basic listening techniques go a long way to addressing burnout issues. Maslach again talks about burnout as a series of pebbles - a bunch of small irritants that wear down a person.
The article ends by listing some solutions to burnout (which are best read in the original) but prompts a few questions for physicians. If you are a practice owner/partner, or a hospital executive, what steps are you proactively taking to address burnout? If you are an attending, what steps are you taking to change your workplace culture? And how can your medical society's wellbeing program help?
The article addresses burnout as a whole and does not focus on the medical profession. It uses the World Health Organization's (WHO) addition of burnout in the ICD-11 and subsequent clarification of burnout as an occupational phenomenon to explore how to best address the condition.
The article points to Christina Maslach's research and a recent Gallup survey on workplace burnout. According to the survey, the top five reasons for workplace burnout are:
- Unfair treatment at work
- Unmanageable workload
- Lack of role clarity
- Lack of communication and support from manager
- Unreasonable time pressure.
They are healthy birds, singing away as they make their way into the cave. But, when they come out full of soot and disease, no longer singing, can you imagine us asking why the canaries made themselves sick? No, because the answer would be obvious: the coal mine is making the birds sick.
The article goes on to describe how basic listening techniques go a long way to addressing burnout issues. Maslach again talks about burnout as a series of pebbles - a bunch of small irritants that wear down a person.
The article ends by listing some solutions to burnout (which are best read in the original) but prompts a few questions for physicians. If you are a practice owner/partner, or a hospital executive, what steps are you proactively taking to address burnout? If you are an attending, what steps are you taking to change your workplace culture? And how can your medical society's wellbeing program help?