Employee well-being has taken several hits in recent years.

Engagement is down, mental health is in tatters, and employees are burning out. Nearly two-thirds (67%) of employees are currently experiencing at least one burnout symptom, according to an April report from talent firm Seramount, and those who feel burned out are nine times more likely to report negative impact on their well-being.

“People keep medicalizing burnout as an individual illness or problem…and saying, ‘What’s wrong with you? You’ve got to fix it. You’ve got to take care of yourself,’ and not really focusing on the other part of the question, which is those chronic job stressors in the workplace,” said Christina Maslach, psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley and author of The Burnout Challenge: Managing People’s Relationships with Their Jobs.

People leaders can focus on alleviating burnout, Maslach told HR Brew, by thinking of it not as an individual’s problem, but as a workplace’s problem, and focusing on the systemic issues that cause it.

Let’s get to the heart of burnout. It’s important to get clear on what burnout is and how it happens before trying to solve it, Maslach said. The World Health Organization defines burnout as “a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.”

The focus is on the chronic, persistent issues causing burnout that happen either “a lot of the time, most of the time, all the time,” Maslach said. “Not like, one-and-done kind of things…[like] we know it’s really stressful during tax season for accountants.”

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