The expression “canaries in a coal mine” refers to something that gives you an early warning of danger or failure. It’s from real-life history. Back in the day, miners would bring canaries into the coal mines to monitor for danger. Because canaries were more sensitive to carbon monoxide, they would show early warning signals to the miners that they were running out of oxygen. It became a system to alert the miners to the toxicity of the workplace.

As described in their new book on burnout (Maslach & Leiter, 2022), no one ever declared that the canaries just needed to be more resilient or do more self-care to be less susceptible to the influence of carbon monoxide. Of course, we want employees to be empowered and to do all the things they can to take care of their health. But if they're in a toxic environment, no amount of resiliency or self-care is going to protect them.  

We’ve all heard the advice for burnout: Do more self-care. While we want to empower individuals to do what they can to invest in their health, this focus on the individual takes away from the well-established contributions that systems, organizations, and culture play in burnout. The individual is squeezed between larger forces: systemic or organizational causes of burnout and cultural factors in burnout. We refer to this as the burnout burger. The individual in the middle with one bun being organizational forces and the other bun being cultural forces.

There are well established organizational causes of burnout (Maslach & Leiter, 2022). One we hear about a lot lately is unsustainable workload. As employees leave the workforce, the workload gets bigger for those who remain. Chronic stress from unrealistic demands, heavy workloads, and long working hours only accelerates the burnout of those left behind. Another example: lack of control, also known as “micromanaging." Lack of autonomy or decision making takes a toll on employees. Employees function better when they have a say in the things that impact them and in how they manage their work. Being “mandated” back to the office hasn’t gone over well with many employees.

There are also cultural factors in burnout. We can define culture as “the customs or norms of a particular social group.” The tricky part about culture is sometimes we don’t realize the subtle messages we receive about how to behave from our culture. It’s like the meme where one fish approaches two other fish and asks "How’s the water?” to which the other fish reply "What’s water?"

Sometimes cultural factors in burnout are conveyed in direct messaging (e.g., Elon Musk: "We will need to be extremely hardcore…This will mean working long hours at high intensity”), sometimes it’s indirect messaging (e.g., healthcare culture suggests you should always put patients first even if that compromises your own health) but we are constantly sending and receiving messages that convey how we should behave (e.g., the employee who stays the latest is most likely to be promoted, even if they’re not the highest-producing worker).

So while it is important to empower employees to do things to manage stress and recover from stress, we also need to start tackling these other factors that influence burnout. We often remind employers that you don’t want to have to rely on only your employees’ help seeking behaviour to address burnout. Addressing cultural and systemic factors in the workplace empowers employers to do things that improve burnout for all employees, not just those at risk.

The good news is that there are things that organizations can do to reduce employee burnout. Consistent research demonstrates that organizations can play a key role in reducing psychosocial factors and hazards that contribute to burnout. Moreover, these efforts will have a much bigger impact because they will support all employees. We have also made significant progress in ways to measure the psychological “toxicity” of workplaces. There are evidence-based tools to measure important psychological aspects in the workplace such as the Workplace Psychological Safety Assessment, so we don’t need to rely on canaries.

Together, employers and employees can have a significant impact on burnout, which benefits everyone.