HBR Guide to Beating Burnout

INTRODUCTION

Rethinking Burnout

by Jennifer Moss

For over 40 years, scientists, academics, and workplace experts were stuck in debate over a clear, unified definition of “burnout.” While the discussion dragged on, popular culture defined it for us. We were told that burnout is a work-life balance problem, not a workplace problem, a “me” issue, not a “we” issue. We were ushered down the path of trying to solve burnout by ourselves, struggling to fix a problem that wasn’t ours alone to fix.

Finally, in 2019, the World Health Organization (WHO) attempted to put an end to the debate by including burnout in the 11th revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) as an occupational phenomenon, a “syndrome conceptualized as resulting ...