Look at your 2025 calendar. You will notice that most public holidays are on weekends. To add salt to injury, countries like Uganda do not postpone public holidays to a week day. Most people look forward to public holidays than mondays. They anticipate rest more than industry. While there might be many contributing factors, some people are flatout burnout even as the year starts- whether they know it or not.
In the years past I have heard the word burnout often. It comes from all industries; banking, professional services, logistics, Non-profit and from entrepreneurs. Some think of burnout as an individual problem, solvable by learning to say no, more meditation, better breathing techniques, practicing resilience—the self-help list goes on. But evidence is mounting that applying personal, Band-Aid solutions to an epic and rapidly evolving workplace phenomenon may be harming, not helping, the battle.
With “burnout” now officially recognized by the World Health Organization (WHO), the responsibility for managing it has shifted away from the individual and toward the organization. Leaders take note: It’s now on you to build a burnout strategy.
After looking through a pile of research of over 7,500 full-time employees by Gallup, the top five reasons for burnout are:
- Unfair treatment at work
- Unmanageable workload
- Lack of role clarity
- Lack of communication and support from their manager
- Unreasonable time pressure.
The list above clearly demonstrates that the root causes of burnout do not really lie with the individual and that they can be averted, if only leadership started prevention strategies much further upstream.
Imagine a canary in a line mine in Kasese. They are healthy birds, singing away as they make their way into the cave. But, when they come out full of soot and disease, no longer singing, can you imagine us asking why the canaries made themselves sick? No, because the answer would be obvious: The copper mine is making the birds sick.
Although developing emotional intelligence skills—like optimism, gratitude, and hope—can give people the rocket fuel they need to be successful, if an employee is dealing with burnout, we have to stop and ask ourselves why. We should never suggest that if they’d just practiced more grit or joined another aerobics class or taken a mindfulness course, their burnout would have been avoided.
I have long been a proponent of empathy and optimism in leadership. I believe in practicing gratitude skills for a happier, higher-performing work and life experience. I endorse the idea of building resilience to better handle stress when it arises. But these skills are not the cure for burnout, nor are they the vaccine.
First, ask yourself as a leader, what is making my staff so unhealthy? Why does our work environment lack the conditions for them to flourish? How can I make it safe for them to work here every day? We have to dig into the data and ask our people what would make work better for them. More generally, we need to better understand what causes people to feel motivated in our organizations, and what causes them frustration.
Motivation-Hygiene Theory.
Frederick Herzberg is known for his dual-factor, motivation-hygiene theory —essentially, what motivates us versus what basic needs must be met in order to maintain job satisfaction. Herzberg found that satisfaction and dissatisfaction are not on a continuum, with one increasing as the other diminishes, but are instead independent of each other. This means that managers need to recognize and attend to both equally.
Motivators are different than hygiene factors. Motivation factors include challenging work, recognition for one’s achievements, responsibility, the opportunity to do something meaningful, involvement in decision making, and a sense of importance to the organization.
On the other hand, hygiene factors include salary, work conditions, company policy and administration, supervision, working relationships, and status and security. Often, employees don’t recognize when an organization has good hygiene, but bad hygiene can cause a major distraction. The latter can come down to seemingly innocuous issues, like having coffee in the break room one day and no more coffee the next. People feel it. Burnout happens when these presupposed features in our day-to-day work lives are missing or taken away.
Consider this example: The music faculty chairs at one of the universities in Uganda decided to put their entire annual improvement budget toward building a soundproof studio. They were certain the rest of the group would be thrilled. They were wrong. In reality, staff just wanted new music stands at a cost of $300. The existing ones were imbalanced or broken, and students would often find their sheet music on the floor when practicing. The ribbon-cutting event for the studio was lackluster, and engagement was low. Some faculty didn’t even show up. The leadership expressed frustration with the lack of gratitude. Neither group shared their dissatisfaction with the other, and over the course of the following year, that seed of anger grew. The nontenured high performers sought out new opportunities, and the faculty lost talent. If staff had been given a say in how the budget was allocated, the team might still be intact for just $300.
Leaders could save themselves a huge amount of employee stress and subsequent burnout if they were just better at asking people what they need.When investing in burnout prevention strategies, it’s best to narrow down the efforts to small, micro-pilots, which mean a lower budget and less risk.
I suggest starting with one or two departments or teams and asking one simple question: If we had this much budget and could spend it on X many items in our department, what would be the first priority? Have the team vote anonymously and then share the data with everyone. Discuss what was prioritized and why and start working down the list. Employees may not have the perfect silver-bullet solution, but they can most certainly tell us what isn’t working—and that is often the most invaluable data.
A larger pilot can start with some critical but some simple tactics. For example, take a referendum on some of the annual events. Ask your employees if they like the holiday party or the annual picnic? What would they keep? What would they change? Or is there something else that they would rather do with that money? Digital tools and simple surveys are easy to use and deploy—particularly if you ask a simple question.
If sending out questions digitally doesn’t feel right, start by walking around. Some of the best data gathering comes from the MBWA style of leadership—management by wandering around.
Organizations have a chance, right now, to fix this type of thing. Burnout is preventable. It requires good organizational hygiene, better data, asking more timely and relevant questions, smarter (more micro) budgeting, and ensuring that wellness offerings are included as part of your well-being strategy. Keep the Zumba, the resilience training, and the mindfulness classes —they are all terrific tools for optimizing mental health and managing stress. But, when it comes to employee burnout, remember, it’s on you leaders, not them.
