Employee burnout isn’t going anywhere any time soon. Here’s how HR can help.

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.”

“It’s much harder for people to recover from chronic stressors than from acute, specific, limited ones…so you really have to look at, ‘What are those chronic job stressors that have not been well managed?’” Maslach said. Many root causes of burnout come from what some researchers call “pebbles in your shoe,” she said, or “the chronic, everyday things that get in the way, that are annoying, that are frustrating…all these little things that really wear people down.”

Leah Buck, employee engagement expert and founder of consulting firm WhyWork, works with companies on improving employee engagement and burnout. Recently, she said, many leaders have asked her for help navigating burnout in a “world that’s crumbling around me.”

“We’re seeing the same issues that we’ve been seeing, honestly, for the past four or five years,” Buck told HR Brew. “I don’t think as a workforce, as a society, we’ve really grappled with some of those questions that the pandemic brought up, and when you continue to let those questions fester, the burnout is just going to grow.”

What can people leaders do? HR leaders have heard it many times before: start with leadership. And reframe how work gets done and how work can “energize” employees, Buck said, with HR as the drivers of this change.

“I think that it’s time that we switch the conversation and we finally say enough is enough. We need to take a moment to check in with our workforce, not just in an annual survey, which is, obviously, our preferred mode of checking in on engagement levels,” Buck said. “But truly sitting down, face to face, manager to employee, HR to employee, and really checking in what’s energizing you lately, what’s draining you lately.”

Burnout also isn’t helped when leaders try throwing wellness benefits at employees, Buck said. Instead, she recommends that people leaders help employees understand the “why” behind their work.

“When employees understand the why behind their work, why it matters, who it affects, how it affects, then their tasks become an investment of energy instead of a drain,” she said. “I’d love to see more leaders talking, rather than about wellness, but talking about the why, the purpose, helping employees connect their day-to-day tasks to how it is affecting the lives of their customers, their clients, the world around them.”

When leaders reframe burnout as a “we problem” versus a “me problem,” Maslach said, teams and companies can start to solve some of the root causes. “A group can get together and say, ‘How could we make it a little better around here? What changes could we make? What could we get rid of?’” she said. “‘[There’s] a word ‘gross’ going around in different companies…GROSS: Get rid of stupid stuff.”

When leaders make these changes, Maslach said, it gives employees hope and can improve burnout.