The topic of workplace burnout has become front and center since the pandemic. Due to this new norm of remote work culture, the boundaries between personal and professional life have become very blurred.
As a coach who helps people navigate their personal and professional lives, I’ve met a number of professionals who are planning to leave their jobs due to feeling burned out. A few people are even taking longer “sabbaticals” because they have been able to save up enough financial resources to take time off from the work world to recover physically or mentally and to figure out what they want to do next. Realistically, most people today don’t have the luxury to take too much time off but they are making plans to leave their jobs for something better.
This movement, coined by Andrew Klotz, an organizational psychologist, has been called “the great resignation” that is impacting companies in more ways than one. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, over 20 million U.S. workers left their jobs during the spring and summer of 2021. The pandemic started the process but even without the pandemic, many people were on a treadmill that they wanted to get off. People have realized how important it is to be fulfilled in the work they do. We’ve even seen a growing number of people looking to work for themselves or start a company.
I wanted to learn more about the topic of workplace burnout so I interviewed KD Hurlbutt, founder of Bask + Being, a company that specializes in helping teams and leaders manage their stress in the workplace. KD has an interesting career journey that led her to do the work she does now around mental health and workplace burnout.
Meet KD Hurlbutt, workplace burnout consultant, coach, and TEDx speaker
KD studied environmental engineering in college which sparked her passion in focusing on how the health of our planet was tied to the health of humans. She started her career working as a stormwater engineer on major light rail and bridge programs in Portland, Oregon and later transitioned into a marketing & brand manager role at that same engineering company. During this time, she realized that no one was talking about workplace safety which connects to the health of humans. In other words, personal burnout is similar to the burnout our earth experiences. KD believes that caring for ourselves will also help us take better care of our planet.
KD experienced her own case of burnout while working as a brand director and sustainability manager. She ended up in the hospital with a life threatening infection that was the wake up call that she needed to make a change. She then left her job and trained to become a health and wellness coach, focusing on the study of breath, body, and brain.
Committed to weaving accessible science, storytelling, and tools to shift the way people experience workplace burnout and sustainability, KD founded Bask + Being. Her company works with businesses to pinpoint and relieve the stressors that contribute to problems like employee burnout, poor communication, retention issues, and decreased morale. The techniques she uses in her coaching practice and in workshops for teams and leaders are heavily influenced by positive psychology and breath work. The aim is to help improve mental health which in the end impacts the overall business.
How to Recognize Burnout?
During my interview with KD, she shared some of the common symptoms of burnout which included:
Feeling exhausted, having trouble sleeping or sleeping too much
Mood swings, depression, and anxiety
Body cycles and hormonal imbalances such as menstruation being off, fertility challenges, acne or other skin problems
Physical symptoms such as pain
Getting sick often or developing serious health issues
I have experienced many of these symptoms. For me, I know that I am burned out when I can’t accomplish simple things at work and in my personal life. I can’t sleep, think about work too much, and lose my creative juices. I tend to not be able to move in any direction and feel overwhelmed.
I asked people to share their symptoms of being burned out on Twitter and here are some additional things that came up:
Panic attacks
Procrastination, lack of focus and motivation, and being distracted
Feelings of being unproductive and incompetent
Having a messy home and overall disorganization
Disengaging from work colleagues and being silent during meetings
The Research on Workplace Burnout
During my interview with KD, she shared that “burnout” was included in the 11th Revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) by the World Health Organization in 2019 (a year before the pandemic) but not by the CDC nor the DSM5 (a diagnostic tool used by mental health experts that defines and classifies mental disorders in order to improve diagnoses, treatment, and research). WHO defined burnout as “a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.” Their definition included 3 dimensions:
feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion
increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one's job
reduced professional efficacy
Deloitte published a report from a study related to workplace burnout that showed that 77 percent of 1000 respondents say they have experienced employee burnout at their current full-time job, with more than half citing more than one occurrence. One in four professionals said they never or rarely were able to take PTO due to the work culture set by leadership. As someone who has worked in the tech and startup space and helped others navigate their jobs, I’ve observed firsthand how prevalent this is today.
Since the pandemic, burnout has been on the rise with the blurring between personal and professional life. The culture of working from home has increased feelings of burnout. A survey by monster.com showed that 69% of workers experienced burnout symptoms while working from home. As someone who has been working from home since the onset of the pandemic, I can attest to the fact that my own feelings of burnout have increased and impacted both my psychological and physical health.
Addressing Workplace Burnout
The research is depressing but there is some hope. As professionals, we create our own paths and have the ability to set boundaries between our personal and work life. KD shared with me some important steps to managing workplace burnout that I am laying out below:
Check in with yourself: Understand where you are on the spectrum of burnout. If you find yourself in the upper half of the spectrum, immediately think about taking some type of break. This can range from taking a few days off at home to a week’s vacation to something a bit longer depending on your situation.
Practice the 3 “R’s”: recognize, relieve, and reduce
Recognize: Pay attention to your breath, body, and brain
Relieve: Once you are aware of where the stress is being held, find ways to manage the symptoms such as meditation and yoga, or other stress relieving activities.
Reduce: This is the hardest part of the process similar to the idea of weeding a garden. Find ways to eliminate the causes of burnout. This means making changes in the way you work.
Set boundaries: Put limits on your energy so that you are focused on activities that are energizing over draining. Create a schedule that allows you to unplug from work.
Take ownership: Manage and communicate your boundaries by knowing when to say yes or no to what aligns with your values.
Get support: You are not meant to do this alone so ask for help when you need it.
Practice self compassion: Be kind to yourself. It starts with you. If you respect yourself then others will learn to as well.
Be of service: Just as you seek support, reciprocate to others who might need the support. Helping others can bring a sense of satisfaction but just remember you need to put on your oxygen mask first.
Final Words
The more that I learned more about this topic, both from KD and from my own research, I realized that I have a lot of work to do here. I wrote this LinkedIn post recently because I was feeling the symptoms of burnout in my own job. Many of us know that tech companies and startups are notoriously known as places where people can burnout quickly. Even job descriptions are written in a way that promotes the type of work culture that can lead to burnout. Because of this, it is important for employees to be clear and vocal about their boundaries while making time for self care. Otherwise, the work that needs to be done can quickly take over one’s life and lead to burnout.
More Resources on This Topic
KD Hurlbutt’s TedX Talk, Gen Z's Mental Health is a Climate Priority: Here's Why where she talks about the connection between climate change and burnout
Hello Monday with Jesi Hempel podcast, The Great Resignation where she interviews Professor Andrew Klotz
This study by SHRM, Lower-Income Earners, Women, Minorities Face Greater Mental Health Challenges, shares some startling statistics for women and people from underrepresented groups as it relates to workplace burnout
How to Improve Your Relationship with Work, an article and tool to audit your relationship with work from Kevin Kirkpatrick’s Path Nine newsletter
This article, How to Set Clear Work Boundaries — and Stick To Them by Jayne Hardy provides some actionable tips on how to structure and communicate your boundaries effectively at work.
Thank you so much for sharing! This part especially spoke to me : “Practice self compassion: Be kind to yourself. It starts with you. If you respect yourself then others will learn to as well.” I also didn’t realize burnout was SO prevalent, 77% is unacceptable. Makes me feel grateful and more confident that I am handling things better than I think.