My employee is burned out, what does that mean and how do I handle it?

Burnout is not regarded as an illness in its own right, but rather as a serious set of symptoms that occur under stress-related, psychological conditions. It is not an illness that can be physically measured, but the symptoms are indeed serious. They create an increased risk of depression, incapacity for work, and unemployment. It does not need to go that far in every case: burnout symptoms are often temporary and there are ways to reduce them in the working environment.

Burnout is preceded by phases with symptoms of stress and overload. When exactly someone moves from one phase to the next is hard to predict, however. What is typical is that an employee feels that difficult circumstances have left them with no control over anything. Employees then struggle with exhaustion, irritability, sleeping badly and poor concentration.

Stress-related conditions like symptoms of tension, overload and burnout can become visible in four different areas: in stress, worry, depression and MUS: medically unexplained symptoms. The problem with this, is that they can be different for each person; one will react to stress by rushing around busily, another will be tense and depressed.

Research has shown that employees with burnout do all display the following symptoms:

• they are exhausted for more than six months;
• they are cynical about their work;
• they lose some of their professional self-confidence.

Because of health ailments and because burnout affects a person's professional self-confidence, performance at work falls off. Employees with psychological ailments report sick twice as often, are less productive and work fewer hours than mentally healthy employees. If someone ends up staying home because of their symptoms, then there is a high risk of them becoming incapacitated for work. The average absence from work due to burnout is 242 days, and the longer an employee is absent, the more difficult it becomes for them to return to work.

As a manager you will likely often have to deal with someone who is feeling uncomfortable or unwell. It can be difficult to start talking about this. On the one hand, you would like to help, but on the other hand you often need to talk to an employee about what they can do for themselves. That can be sensitive, but it helps to know that even giving someone direction will often contribute to their recovery. It most important that this conversation happens, because apparently an employee who is burned out can still take pleasure in their work. That very pleasure in their work can help to reduce the burnout symptoms. If you can prevent someone from dropping out, by offering the right kind of support, that is a win-win: for the employee themselves and for the organisation.

Under the Health & Safety Law, employers must organise work in such a way that it does not pose any threats to employees' health and safety. They therefore need to remove the risk factors that create burnout, as far as possible. Pressure of work is a significant risk factor, as are other forms of psychosocial workplace hazards that can lead to work-related stress. The employer also needs to include this risk in the risk inventory and evaluation (RI&E).

Read the book From burnout to resilience – guidelines for managers (Dutch) by company doctor Rob Hoedeman. Using a "spiral model" he developed, he describes how you as a manager can help prevent burnout in employees.