The concept of burnout is complex and the employer’s duty of care responsibility to assess and mitigate foreseeable risk is often misunderstood, even by well-meaning responsible employers. The purpose of this paper is to provide some general guidance for employers—and in particular HR practitioners—in meeting their baseline duty of care obligations to worker burnout regardless of the sector in which they operate. The author, Lisbeth Claus, is a Professor Emerita of Management and Global Human Resources at the Atkinson Graduate School of Management of Willamette University.
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Recent trend reports indicate that stress and burnout among workers of all occupations are on the rise compared to 2019 pre-pandemic levels, resulting in a ‘burnout crisis’. The reasons cited for this widespread burnout focus mainly on the macro context of the world of work: crucible events like the pandemic, the isolation of remote workers, staffing shortages due to the ‘great resignation’, cost cutting by employers, and workers being always ‘on’ due to communication technologies—all conditions contributing to work overload, the blurring of work and life boundaries, and work stress. In addition to those macro externalities, burnout is also due to unhealthy work cultures at the organizational meso-environmental level. Burnout has become an important topic in the wellbeing conversations of today.