Shifting the Burnout System
~ 9 minute read
Photo credit: Tangerine Newt
Ed Yong was recently asked about burnout in an interview with The New York Times. Yong is a science journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the pandemic, and saw first-hand what burnout looks like in medical workers on the frontlines. He described disliking the term burnout, since it wasn’t that workers couldn’t handle their job.
“They couldn’t handle not being able to do their job. They saw around them all of the institutional and systemic factors that prevented them from providing the care that they wanted to provide. For them it was more about this idea of moral injury, this massive gulf between what you want the world to be and what you see happening around you.”
Given Yong’s experience with medical workers, it’s no surprise that the term burnout was first applied to free clinic volunteers in New York during the 1970s. Fifty years later, we now know that burnout spreads far beyond the healthcare industry. In 2024, the Society for Human Resource Management found that 44% of those surveyed reported burnout. Yet, as Yong’s experience notes, there’s good reason to believe that those working on issues they care about are even more prone.
Burnout is complex. How you prevent and address burnout will vary by workplace. But for values-driven organizations, what is especially important is to validate the reality of what your people are seeing and feeling. What does that mean, and how do you do it?
What is Burnout and Does it Matter?
Burnout can feel a lot like pushing against a brick wall. Photo credit: Donnie Rosie
Burnout can be thought of as a downtrodden cocktail of exhaustion, cynicism, and low efficacy. It’s a pervasive “what’s the point?” threaded through your work. Your purpose shifts, from doing good work, to just doing the work, to just getting through the week, the day, the hour.
Sure, performance is affected, but even if it wasn’t, burnout’s association with health is concerning enough. The American Psychological Association reports that those with burnout face a 180% increased risk of developing depressive disorder and 84% increased risk of Type 2 diabetes. Last year, Nonprofit Quarterly interviewed Beth Kanter, writer and leader on nonprofit wellbeing and digital transformation. Remarking on burnout she emphasized how nonprofits face “. . .big problems, and we just don’t have the resources to solve them. So, you’re always fighting, you’re always fighting.”
It's like pushing a wall when the wall won’t budge. Push long enough without any give, and at some point, you’re going to run out of energy, motivation, and faith that you’re moving anything at all.
How Do You Assess Burnout?
Photo credit: Dawit
You need to assess whether you and your staff are burnt out.
While some know full well when they are experiencing burnout, not everyone does. I have a doctorate in psychology, and I did not realize I was burned out until someone brought it up. I just thought I wasn’t getting enough sleep, that I just wasn’t good at my job anymore, that maybe I never was, and this was just the way things were now. Ok, it sounds obvious in retrospect, but to be fair to myself, I hadn’t delved into the research on burnout at the time, so I didn’t know what to look for.
Here are some questions to ask yourself that can help you understand whether you’re experiencing the key elements of burnout: Exhaustion, cynicism, and low efficacy. These three elements, derived from the research of psychologist Christina Maslach, don’t always occur together, so you might evidence only one or two elements of burnout. And as a caution, these questions are not a diagnostic tool. They’re a tool to help guide your inquiry:
“Are you often very tired at work?”
“Do you care about your efforts a lot less than you used to?”
“Are you just going through the motions?”
“Do you feel like nothing you do makes a difference?”
These questions apply to work, but if you’re feeling these more broadly in your life, consider reaching out to the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. If you think you may be experiencing work burnout, it might be helpful to take stock of your work life and whether it serves you. But if you think burnout means you’ve done something wrong, please understand: Burnout is not an individual failing. Burnout is a symptom of deeper issues with where you work and beyond.
What Do Organizations Do?
Photo credit: Ross Findon
Many of the ways to address burnout are intuitive: Improve staff capacity, manage workload, clarify roles, facilitate communication, and build more development opportunities.
In the language of one prominent theory:
Find ways to mitigate or manage the demands of a job.
Build the resources and support available to your people.
Unfortunately, many of these initiatives rely on funding that social change organizations are sorely lacking.
The measures above are important and necessary, but in my experience what’s just as critical is to be honest about where your organization is at, and what your people are feeling. Truth and validating the feelings of people you care about aren’t very expensive. That doesn’t absolve leaders of the need to make substantive changes, but real change requires openness and vulnerability.
Stated organizational values can be a wonderful thing, but if the culture of the organization is misaligned with its stated values, denying that misalignment will only make matters worse. In extreme cases, as Ed Yong notes, burnout treads into the territory of moral injury. People may find they are operating within an institution and system that undermines what and who they care about. With every push, the wall seems only to close in on them.
What Do We Do?
Photo Credit: Hillary Ungson
When the socio-political climate is hostile (and it is, often), the effects of burnout are more deeply felt by those with marginalized identities. Unsurprisingly, in one study of educators, when schools were viewed as less open to discussing racial conflict, women of color reported experiencing greater burnout. In another, interviews with nonbinary workers found that anticipating misgendering in their workplace contributed to further burnout. These findings add to pandemic era research showing that discrimination is a very real factor contributing to burnout.
This touches on something that much of the organizational research hasn’t grappled with: Burnout is not just a symptom of workplace values, but of a system that demands work from those it does not value.
In Decolonizing Bodies: Stories of Embodied Resistance, Healing and Liberation, Dr. Alexia Arani, professor of Women’s, Gender & Queer Studies at Cal Poly, describes this palpably. In her chapter, “Burnout: A Queer Femme of Color Auto-Ethnography,” she describes that her burnout was not one arising from transient economic or cultural shifts.
“Our burnout was not the result of the 2008 economic recession and ensuing efforts to gain financial stability. Ours were wounds of dispossession, diaspora, and the daily struggle to forge a sense of safety and belonging in a place that continually reminds you that you aren’t wanted.”
Stopgap measures like an occasional vacation are helpful, but they don’t address systemic issues. Research suggests that the effect of vacations on burnout is real, but is essentially wiped out after six weeks of work. Rather than one-off vacations or quick fixes purchased through the wellness industry, psychiatrist Pooja Lakshmin, MD, suggests that real self-care is about larger shifts in our values. Not just at the individual and organizational levels—those are important too—but at the systemic level.
At its core, burnout is the product of attempts at erasure and dehumanization. There’s a tendency to simplify it as the response to an organization that does not recognize the challenge of work or provide the needed support for it. It’s certainly true that more staff capacity can make your job easier. But organizations need to understand that systems are actively attempting to erase the existence of people, whether through anti-trans legislation, racist policies or ableist practices.
Staff capacity is helpful, but doing so while removing initiatives that acknowledge active erasure is less so. It’s tearing down one wall while helping to erect a larger one.
If this all sounds too big to handle at once, and alone, it’s because it is. The burnout system’s trick is to make you think going-it alone is the only way—whether you’re an individual worker or an organizational leader. The truth is we all have intersecting roles to play. The strength in social change organizations is that they have values to anchor their efforts.
Individuals need to check in with themselves, find what works for them, and understand that what we do and who we are is inherently valuable. Exhaustion is not an individual failing. Remember that burnout is a symptom of a broader issue, so it’s likely that someone else you’re working with is feeling the same way. Connecting with others can help.
Organizations need to check in with their people, be honest about the realities they face, and change policies and practices that humanize workers. Connecting with other organizations can also help identify broader trends and establish collective strategies for addressing the problem.
We might all do better by scoping outwards, looking at the context in which we are working and our organizations are operating. We can start by asking why work is the way it is, who it benefits, and what our role is in the whole endeavor. If you’re pushing against something that sometimes gives, sometimes doesn’t, and sometimes pushes back on you, it might be helpful to think about who is on the other side. Maybe they want to join you on your end, maybe it’d be helpful to move to theirs, or maybe there’s a different direction worth going in altogether.
