Andrés had been working hard for months to launch a brand; calls, text reviews, coordinate agencies. Two days before the big day he felt disconnected, as in a parallel world, Exhausted. He literally couldn’t get out of bed. He called his boss and resigned … he couldn’t take it anymore.
The boss’s response was very generous: “Let’s finish the launch and you take two weeks off. What you have is’burnout‘”
Today that word is repeated much more frequently than before, it seems like a common diagnosis. The levels of burnout at work have increased dramatically, leading to total lockdown, literally feeling burned out.
It is by no means a new phenomenon, the difference is that today it is talked about. Emotions have won. When it comes to work environments with the possibility of expression and transparency, the emotional stress and mental illness in general has a place. Without a doubt – with many exceptions from companies and organizations with a high level of toxicity – progress is very significant.
What we have fallen short of is the solutions. As is the case with many diseases, we arrive at the diagnosis, sometimes accusatory, of a “burned” person.
It seems that the most serious part of this diagnosis is that we do not anticipate the solutions, but that it is based on two false ideas: that it is acute (that is, that it is a peak, temporary, that it goes away at some point) and that it is individual (That is, it is something that happens to some very particular people and not to others). No, the most serious thing is that we have associated the absence of burnout to a developable competence: resilience.
All of this is extremely worrying. It is useless to take steps to open up emotions and to measure mental affectation in the work environment if we do not know how to handle it, or if we believe ourselves to be therapists “..
The main causes of burnout they do not fall on people — these are the victims — they are on organizations. In this sense, it should be understood that if there is a person who suffers from this syndrome, it is highly probable that there are many more, to the extent that it is highly transmissible. If it is believed that addressing the “temporary anguish of a person who is not resilient” is completely failing the approach: it is never about a person, it is not a temporary phenomenon, and it is not about the level of resilience. Who does not show the symptoms of being burned does not mean that he does not suffer them, there are those who have higher pain thresholds than others.
As organizations we must strive for safe emotional environments, and this security must be manifested collectively. Addressing individual discomfort is a way of turning one’s back on the collective, of caring for a single victim of a social pandemic. If we think of a burning house, probably wood and paper decompose with high speed. This will not happen with concrete, but that does not mean that it does not burn.
Consequently, before a symptom of burnout we must, of course, attend to those who suffer and manifest it, but the most important thing is to understand the ecosystem as a whole. The only ones I know who blow themselves up are political and religious radicals. If someone has been burned or is burning, it is because there is fire, and that fire is not put out by taking the individual out of the fire.
Compliance with the regulations with which many consulting firms have enriched themselves, the NOM-035, has diverted attention to the problem of psychosocial risks in the workplace and has minimized it to a survey and a motivational intervention to “make you want to”. It is unfortunate that something so serious and recurrent receives such precarious treatment, and that with this it can be said that the norm is “met”. The emotions, the deep mental affectations, the permanent damage of this phenomenon is today one of the most serious public health problems.
To show it by the way of exaggeration: training and developing people in resilience is sometimes almost like asking, elegantly, for masochism and rewarding it.
What if we begin to understand that this burnout it’s a collective phenomenon? How would we see it differently when we begin to realize that if there is someone in this situation, it is very likely that there are more? When will we understand that it is a chronic situation and not a circumstantial one?
Let’s not continue teaching people to “hold on” under the resilience discourse, that’s downright inhuman. “Carlitos” Páez, one of the survivors of the Los Andes accident, says that “each one has a different anxiety meter installed”. The good guys are not the ones that endure heat and the bad guys the ones that get burned. Good organizations are those who are aware of their temperature and take steps to manage it properly.
And no, it is not about sending Andrés to rest for two weeks. For when he returns, he is going to unknowingly enter a burning house. And most likely it will burn.
Reference-www.eleconomista.com.mx