Why Burnout is Contagious (and What We Can Do About It)

I’ve worked in a few high burnout, high turnover environments. Most memorably, I was once part of a department that lost 75% of its people in about 3 months, and those who stayed were openly looking for new jobs. A lot of us have war stories about what it’s like to be in that situation, and there are a number of commonalities: lack of focus, unclear responsibilities, and typically lots of conflict.

Sometimes in fighting and lack of teamwork are cited as the cause of the rampant burnout, but that’s lazy investigating. The question should be what’s causing the conflict and lack of clarity? The answer is virtually always culture – the culture of the organization, but also culture in a broader sense.

When a faulty organizational culture results in unreasonable demands, the larger culture influences how we respond. Most often, those of us who are passionate or driven respond initially by stepping up. A number of cultural discourses support this response. We may believe:

• We can make time.
• Doing more is possible. I just need to get more organized.
• Taking on more will always be rewarded.
• Those who care more do more.

Sometimes organizational culture rights itself, and demands get right-sized. But all too often, this doesn’t happen, and the more we took on becomes the new normal, the baseline expectation. We start to burn out from the unsustainable situation. Cynicism goes up and empathy goes down. This happens not because we’re uncaring people, but because we can’t afford to be empathetic anymore. All of our available mental and emotional energy has been funneled into the effort of trying to manage the impossible.

Meanwhile, the unsustainable culture is taking a toll on everyone around us, and in our empathy-impaired state, we may start to say things like:

• If I have to work holidays, everyone else does too.
• I don’t care if you’re exhausted. We’re all exhausted.
• I don’t have time to be “nice.”
• Why am I surrounded by lazy people?

Burnout becomes contagious because the confluence of negative organizational culture and toxic productivity culture has us treating one another terribly. Organizational culture then becomes steadily worse.

It doesn’t have to be this way. We may or may not be in a position to fix the organizational culture, and we certainly can’t fix the broader culture single handedly. But we can recognize what’s really going on and choose how we respond.

Some ways to combat the contagion of burnout:

1.     Put the blame in the right place. There is no such thing as an organization with only one burned out person. If you’re feeling it, other people are feeling it also. The problem is not you or them. The problem is faulty culture, unreasonable demands, and unsustainable expectations.

2.     Recognize that people respond to stress differently. Some people go into superhero mode. Some try to organize the chaos. Some spin with anxiety. Some disengage or shut down. These are all variations of the same thing.

3.     Band together. Resist the temptation to let a messed up culture pull you into conflict. Once it’s clear that everyone is in the same unsustainable situation, it’s possible to choose to create a mutually supportive environment. Start with the assumption that everyone around you is responding to the same stress. Given that, where can you find common ground? What can you agree on?

I’ve seen groups of people work together and support one another, even in nightmare organizations. Sometimes it looks like mutually deciding which subset of mandates to work towards and which things are just not going to get done. Other times, everyone is trying to get out, and people share job leads and agree to recommend one another.

While no individual can fix a cultural mess, we can choose how we respond to a cultural mess. As Kelly Diels likes to say, we are the culture makers. She defines culture making as “tiny acts of doing it differently.” In a high burnout culture, responding with empathy and creating support among colleagues are very significant acts of doing things differently. This is how we build anti-burnout culture.

Some questions to consider:

• What aspects of your organization’s culture (or your field’s culture) are leading to burnout?
• What are some tiny ways you can choose not to go along? To do things differently?

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