Thread by @BusinessInsider

Employee burnout is now recognized by the World Health Organization as a "syndrome."

Think pieces on burnout often blame the mass shift to remote work or that it’s a worker problem. But these lies are only benefiting companies, @edzitron writes.

businessinsider.com/employee-worke…

The first big fiction of the "burnout wave" is that work never invaded your personal life before the pandemic.

But bosses have been able to email employees during off-hours for a while. The first iPhone came out in 2007 and Slack launched in 2013.

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Even if an after-hours email takes only a second, it interrupts your recovery from work, creates an anxiety that there is always more work, and injects the idea that no matter how much you try to unplug from work, it can always get to you, Zitron says.

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Remote work isn't perfect, but it has been found to have benefits for many employees.

And contrary to what companies want you to think, it's neither the original trigger nor the ongoing cause of employee burnout.

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Another lie is that burnout is created by the worker. But workers who are burned out are not failing some test of time management.

They do not need to take time off, or meditate, or come up with a better way to communicate with their manager.

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This is all corporate misdirection masquerading as helpfulness, Zitron says.

Companies have avoided blame because they have successfully portrayed burnout as a problem caused by work but not by the company itself.

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But the real villain is the company — and the managers and executives who are failing the people they are supposed to empower, Zitron writes.

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A manager's job is to make sure a worker is not burned out — and, indeed, to notice early signs and alleviate them.

If a company is discussing burnout without a full audit of the workplace, it does not actually care about the problem.

businessinsider.com/employee-worke…

Burnout in the workplace isn't a vast, complex tapestry that we still don’t understand.

It's a failure of employers and managers to address core problems plaguing their employees: workplace harassment, an overwhelming workload, and more.

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To solve these problems, companies need to first recognize that they are the issue.

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