Burnout has really come to the fore in the past few years and is now an official medical diagnosis. It has been described by the World Health Organisation as “an occupational phenomenon” with implications for individual wellbeing and significant costs to organisations. This has shifted the responsibility for burnout away from the individual towards the organisation.

In reality, it is wrong to apportion accountability to either individuals or organisations. We should not be concerned with who is responsible, rather what to do about it. If people are burned out, they are not well, which is to the detriment of the individual and the organisation. Preventing burnout should be uppermost in our minds rather than treating the symptoms and looking for someone to blame.

Herein lies the problem; we simply have not done enough to understand why burnout is such an issue. There is plenty of discussion about the topic but very little which gets to its root. A couple of weeks ago, a leading academic review published two articles about burnout on the same day. One was entitled “The Six Causes of Burnout” and the other purported to have identified the “Five Causes”. Only two were common to both articles and none of those proposed could properly be called a root cause, which is what we really need in order to to design interventions which successfully prevent burnout.

One of the two so-called causes which featured in both articles was an unmanageable workload, but to tackle this, we need to understand why the workload is unmanageable. Perhaps the timeframe for the task is unrealistic. Maybe the task outcomes have not been clearly defined. Or it could be that the individual or team lacks the requisite skills. Even these are only next level causes. Having identified these, we must ask why the task outcomes were not clearly defined. Perhaps the project manager was not given enough information by the client, or they themselves lack specialist knowledge of the particular domain. Until we get to a point where we can clearly answer the question “how do we fix this so it does not happen again”, we have not reached the root cause.

Even the items populating measures considered the gold standards of burnout metrics, such as the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) and the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory (CBI) cannot be considered root causes, they are largely symptomatic factors. While these will do a decent job of telling us where burnout risk is present, they do little to help identify the real causes.

The result of failing to identify the root cause will be proposed solutions which are similarly opaque. In the above-mentioned articles we are encouraged to take steps to reduce the workload, which isn’t much help if we don’t know why it is unmanageable. Inevitably, this leads to treating the symptoms, by giving people a bit of time off, or some short-term support, but it does not prevent it happening again. These solutions are surface-level and do not address the issue longer-term.

“So long as we continue to treat symptoms rather than identify and fix root causes, we will never really tackle burnout."

To tackle the burnout epidemic, true root causes need to be identified. However, these are likely to be too complex to fit neatly into a nice infographic. They will be personal, and they will be context dependent. There are, however, some steps we can take to help organisations uncover root causes quickly and precisely.

The first step is to clearly define burnout. At MindAlpha, we consider it as a state of extreme low motivation which has become debilitating to the extent of damaging an individual’s performance and poses a threat to their mental or physical wellbeing.

Differentiating the symptoms, such as decreased wellbeing, from the motivational causes is critical because, as we have established in previous research, symptoms associated with burnout do not only come from a demotivating or toxic work environment, the relationship also s the other way. Stress which comes from an external source can change our perception of the working environment, leading us to incorrectly attribute the cause of burnout to the organisation and apply the wrong solution.

The MindAlpha Motivation Metrics framework provides us with a tool for mapping human motivation which can help identify the root causes of burnout as well as identify individuals with an elevated risk, hopefully before problems occur.

“When we can stop asking why something has happened, and ask instead how we can prevent it happening again, we have found the root cause.”

According to our model, individuals who are highly motivated at the individual level but lack collective motivation and the support the group environment provides are at greater risk of burnout than those without this imbalance. We have also noted how a high degree of autonomy (generally a positive motivator) without the appropriate skill-set, as measured within our proficiency factor, can lead to burnout.

Our analytical framework allows us to understand which specific area of motivation is weak; is there a low sense of belonging? Do people lack psychological safety? Are their skills poorly matched to the requirements of the job? Or do they not believe the organisation supports them? Based on these questions, we can ask: why is this the case? Do they lack belonging because they don’t know the right people in the organisation? Or do they feel excluded from certain decision processes? Do they need specific training in a certain area? Or do they find it hard to ask for help?

Eventually we can stop asking “why” and ask “how can we fix this?", then we have uncovered the root cause.