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Burnout has become one of the most talked about workplace topics, and its impact is far-reaching. Learning how to identify burnout and understanding what symptoms to look for is an essential first-step in prevention and allowing individuals, teams, and leaders to build resilience and thrive at work.

Paula Davis, the founder of the Stress and Resilience Institute, has been researching new frameworks to help organizations prevent employee burnout. Here, in this excerpt from her conversation with Rotman School professor Julie McCarthy, Davis offers practical advice on how to spot burnout. Davis’ framework emphasizes three main indicators that suggest burnout and how to distinguish it from stress.

First, if you are experiencing chronic physical and emotional exhaustion. Davis notes that with this symptom “the key word is chronic — you are experiencing it more often than not, it’s over a period of time and nothing is refueling your tank”.

Second, David explains that chronic cynicism is a key indicator and advises people to be aware of when they are becoming regularly and consistently annoyed by other people, including coworkers and clients.

Third, Davis notes that losing a sense of impact in your work is a sign of burnout. Davis advises that you might be asking yourself questions such as “Is this what I want to do? Is the work meaningful to me? And, do I have a deeper sense of connection?”

Overall, the potential for burnout is most likely in situations where the demands on people are exceeding their resources. In the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, “we had to navigate a new environment overnight: being distant from people we interacted with that gave us support, navigating new technology and longer hours,” says Davis. This created “a lot of additional demands but a lot of the resources we relied on — like feedback from our leaders, connecting with colleagues, exercising – were taken away from us, so the imbalance between demands and resources became greater than at the beginning of the pandemic.”

This conversation draws upon Beating Burnout at Work: Why Teams Hold the Secret to Well-Being and Resilience (Wharton School Press, 2021) by Julie Davis, and was excerpted from the Rotman Events Leadership Experts Speaker Series.