Last week I was on a panel addressing the topic of burnout. It’s a topic that pops up with some frequency, yet the misconception that burnout is a personal problem seems to persist.

Burnout isn’t something you can solve by doing breathing exercises or starting a bullet-journal. Burnout is a systemic issue which the WHO now classifies as an organizational phenomenon, and which therefore requires systemic change to address.

While high workloads and time pressure are some of the factors most commonly associated with burnout, this is more likely correlation than causation. People can move mountains when they are motivated, feel a sense of agency, and are well-supported by their team, but when they lack certainty, feel disconnected from their colleagues, and feel no-sense of progress, that’s when things start to grind you down.

Burnout is about the quality of the work experience, not the quantity of work.

Frederick Herzberg was a US clinical psychologist who developed the “Hygiene-Motivation” theory. He had been dissecting employee’s attitudes to their jobs and concluded that people have two sets of needs:

1. “lower level needs as an animal to avoid pain and deprivation”
2. “higher level needs as a human being to grow psychologically”

All too often companies focus on the lower level needs, or “hygiene factors”, which includes things such as salary, office conditions, time-off, and working relationships. These are important, for sure, but they are not enough to stave off burnout. And in some ways can make things worse.

“Why do I feel so burned out? Things are great. I work for one of the best companies in the world, who provide me free food for every meal, give me access to gyms with awesome trainers, gift me massage vouchers, and offer wine-pairing combos at our weekly all hands. I suck.” — paraphrasing myself in 2011.

To avoid burnout, you also need to address the higher level needs, or as Herzberg called them “motivation factors”. This means ensuring people feel challenged with their work, that they receive recognition, have increasing responsibility, are able to do something meaningful, and feel agency in how decisions are made.

Burnout is not an easy problem to solve and honestly every company will have a unique set of dysfunctions that will contribute to their teams’ burnout from time to time. The only thing to do is to start asking questions. Talk to people about what is wrong and what could be better. Take note of things they don’t say, as well as what they do say. Then form hypotheses for how to address both the hygiene and motivation needs that might be lacking.

A common place where we see problems on the hygiene side is around belonging, which can be especially acute for remote teams.

On the motivation side a common problem is feeling no sense progress. This can be reduced by setting a cadence of work that includes regular moments of reflection, where you review and celebrate all that you actually accomplished, causing work to feel less like a grind.