Is my team burnt out, or just tired?
What Burnout Is, and What It Is Not
Three specific components, not a synonym for exhaustion. The distinction matters because the response to each is different.
Explainer
Foundations
Three specific components, not a synonym for tiredness. Plus the frame used throughout — six areas of mismatch between the job and the person — and the boundary between an employer's role and a clinician's.
6 questions
Where does burnout actually come from?
The Six Areas of Mismatch
Workload, control, reward, community, fairness and values. A diagnostic frame that points at fixable conditions rather than at people.
Reference
We bought a wellbeing app and nothing changed. Why?
Why Individual Interventions Underperform
Most wellbeing spending targets the person's capacity to absorb bad conditions. The evidence favours changing the conditions.
Analysis
How do I justify this to a finance director?
The Business Case, Stated Honestly
Real costs exist and the headline figures circulating are frequently unsupportable. Which numbers survive scrutiny and which do not.
Analysis
When is this beyond what a manager should handle?
Stress, Burnout and Clinical Conditions
Where the employer's role ends and professional care begins. Managers are not clinicians, and acting as one causes harm.
Reference
How much of this is even within our power?
What an Employer Actually Controls
A short list of conditions inside the organisation's gift, a shorter one of things it can only avoid worsening, and where the boundary sits.
Analysis