The SLP burnout problem, Part 2: What can employers do?

If you haven’t read Part 1, please do that first! Your burnout framework needs to be clear before you build any solutions. When you’re ready, your path forward has three steps:

1. Acknowledge that you start with the organization, not the individual.

Burnout is employer-focused by definition. This is for many reasons (read Part 1), but here’s a recap of the major ones:

• Research indicates that organization-directed changes outperform individual-directed ones (this research is on physicians, as we don’t have comparable SLP studies).
• Employee behaviors that result from burnout likely have other contributors, too. But if you start by focusing on those other things, you’re likely to skip making organizational changes at all.

  • Here’s what we mean by that: If you were faced with employee behaviors that are symptoms of burnout (e.g., missed deadlines, negativity at the workplace, slow or ineffective work) without the label “burnout” attached to it, you might jump straight to performance improvement plans (PIP), feedback matrices, or termination processes—essentially, telling the employee to “fix their behavior” before the organization fixes its systems. However, if you view those same behaviors through a “burnout” lens, organizational solutions would come first. Basically, a clear understanding of burnout helps you make sense of employee red flags so you don't bypass good solutions entirely.

     

What you’re looking for is organizational solutions, not explanations of individual failing. This will help you audit your organization and implement company corrections first, exhausting those before considering other explanations. This will also help you avoid junk burnout tips, of which there are a lot.

2. Consider the usual suspects.

You need to change something in your organization to address burnout, but what? There’s a model for that—actually more than one. Some big ones are the Job Demands–Resources (JD-R) model and the Areas of Worklife (Maslach) model, although they share the same definition of burnout, so they're quite similar. We’ve been using Maslach’s model in our own work, so we’ll use that as a framework to get you started. Here, burnout is defined as something requiring organizational problem-solving across six domains:

1. Workload: An unreasonably high workload increases burnout.
2. Control: Perceived lack of control, micromanagement, or lack of autonomy over how, when, or where work gets done increases burnout.
3. Reward: Feeling under-rewarded or under-acknowledged increases burnout. This applies to both monetary and non-monetary rewards, as well as opportunities for advancement.
4. Community: Toxic workplace culture, feeling left out, lack of psychological safety, and unsupportive colleagues increase burnout.
5. Fairness: Favoritism, unequal pay, unclear career paths, and arbitrary decision-making increase burnout.
6. Values: Being forced to do work that conflicts with personal ethics or that feels meaningless increases burnout.

Each of these factors alone can cause burnout, but multiple factors tend to make it worse, and not every factor is equal. A frequently replicated finding in this literature is that lack of autonomy (control) and lack of recognition (reward) are often stronger predictors of burnout than raw hours worked (workload).

Burnout amplifiers don’t affect everyone the same. When organizational problem-solving has been exhausted, persistent signs of burnout within an employee are considered signs of a job–person mismatch.

Target one domain at a time. Start with the simplest one for your organization. For example, if keeping workload demands under control is easiest for your org, then tackle that first across all roles, and then move on to something else like reward or control. Tackle it one at a time, domain-by-domain, circling back to ones you’ve already targeted in order to stay on top of evolving workplace health.

3. Pull in additional resources to help you delve deeper.

Once you pick a domain to tackle, you’re going to need to go deeper pretty quickly:

• How do I know I’m doing “enough” as an employer to keep this under control?
• What works well in organizations like mine?
• What doesn’t work?
• What can I learn from people who’ve done this before?

At this point, you’ll want to choose a path toward experts more qualified than us, and resources deeper than what we can provide here. Here are some options:

Books (or audiobooks)

• The Burnout Challenge. Helps you not only understand the drivers of burnout, but also problem-solve how to reduce its impact in your own organization. One thing we found super interesting in this book was the focus on reducing incivility as one of the most important places to start, and that people’s attitudes toward each other matter almost more than anything else. Meaning—one jerk can take an entire team down, driving burnout up across the board, simply because they’re hard to work with or make others feel uncomfortable. [Don’t you love being an employer?!.....]
• The Burnout Epidemic. Another high-quality, evidence-based book that overlaps a lot with The Burnout Challenge.

Research-based websites

• You could also work through the US Surgeon General’s Framework for Workplace Mental Health and Wellbeing. It’s totally free, science-based, and a solid general starting point. Its five primary focuses are: protection from harm, connection and community, work-life harmony, mattering at work, and opportunity for growth. Also see this article from NIOSH.
• Or, if you want a website focused on burnout prevention for employers, try Mind Share Partners, a respected non-profit with tons of free resources.

SLP experts

• The Mentorship Collective is run by SLP employers with expertise in developing strong, burnout-resistant SLP teams. To sample their content and get some quick free tips, check out their Instagram.
• There are many other podcasts, blogs, etc., and we’d welcome your recommendations of ones you’ve found helpful. (Email them to jobs@theinformedslp.com) We’ll read or listen and add the evidence-backed ones here!

This list is purposely short to get you started because we want you to feel empowered to find solutions that fit your organization. If you keep your sights set on evidence-based organizational changes, it’ll help you bypass a lot of the junk resources out there that either have the wrong focus, aren’t geared toward employers, or are about another topic entirely (e.g., self-improvement literature). Following that through-line will help you feel confident that the SLPs who work for you are in the healthiest, most supportive environment you can provide.