Quiz: Assess Your Burnout Risk—and Learn How to Avoid the Employee "Turnover Tsunami"

Analysts are calling it a “resignation wave” and a “turnover tsunami”: recent surveys have suggested that up to 40% of workers want to leave their jobs in 2021.

The COVID-19 pandemic kicked off a massive shift in work worldwide—millions left the office, lost their jobs, or were forced into unsafe positions as “essential workers” who received little support from their companies. Now, as vaccinations speed up economic recovery, many of those workers are considering new options.

While reasons for job turnover are personal and varied, many people have chosen to find new employment this year due to burnout. Burnout is a state of mental, emotional, and sometimes even physical exhaustion, caused by work-related stress. The pandemic pushed many workers into this state, ranging from those in service industries where COVID-19 protections were difficult to maintain to those white-collar workers who felt isolated and overworked.

Many employers think of burnout as a binary: either a worker is burned out or they aren’t. But in fact, the condition exists on a spectrum and can be measured, as burnout expert Leah Weiss explains in an article for the Stanford Social Innovation Review. The condition is also distinctive from mental health conditions such as depression and anxiety, though workers in distress may suffer from burnout and a mental health condition at the same time.

Unlike mental health conditions, burnout may be directly caused by organizational issues in a company or on a specific team, Weiss writes. For example, members of a team that does not have sufficient personnel or resources to complete necessary responsibilities may be more likely to burn out. When company leadership takes steps to understand burnout’s causes and measure the condition among the whole organization, those leaders can help prevent their workers from burning out.

What is your burnout risk score? This quiz will help you find out, along with providing statistics on who burns out and why. If your burnout risk is high, consider talking to your manager about steps your company may take to improve working conditions—more on that later.

Are you managing a team? You might be interested in our cheat sheet on how to talk to your teams about burnout.

Compare your answers to the source dataset

This quiz was based on a source dataset including responses from 20,000 people who took the same survey you did. Compare your answers with other survey responses, shown below.

The respondents were split fairly evenly among gender, with slightly more women than men (52% women, 48% men). Most worked at service companies, and a majority were able to work from home; 54% said this was an option, compared to 46% who did not. Most had mid-level positions, ranging from junior to director. Few respondents characterized their fatigue and responsibility allocations as all the way up at 10 or down at 0; most were somewhere in the middle—factors that contribute to their burnout risk.

Key insight 1: Gender breakdown

This chart shows burnout scores by gender. While more women responded to the survey, men appear to be more at risk of burnout: a higher share of men had burnout scores in the 0.5 to 0.8 range. The majority of women, meanwhile, have burnout scores between 0.2 and 0.6.

Key insight 2: Seniority

Here, we see that more senior employees tend to have higher burnout scores. This pattern holds for both men and women, but men have slightly higher scores for most positions: men at junior and senior-level positions have average burnout scores of 0.37 and 0.46, respectively, compared to corresponding scores of 0.30 and 0.42 for women.

Key insight 3: Business

What makes workers in higher-level positions more susceptible to burnout? One answer may be tied to how overwhelmed they feel in their roles. More senior workers tend to face busier schedules and more responsibilities; in the survey, both men and women in chief positions scored their business over 9, on average, compared to scores under 4 for those in junior and senior positions.

Key insight 4: Leaving reasons

Some employers may think regular raises provide workers with sufficient incentive to stay at their jobs. In fact, worker reasons for quitting are more complicated, and may often be tied to burnout.

A Gallup poll conducted in 2008 found that career advancement was the most common motivator behind a voluntary job change by far; 32% of workers surveyed left for this reason. Pay, lack of job fit, management, and flexibility were also common motivators—and they’re becoming more common in 2021. One survey from Prudential, conducted in March 2021, found 42% of current remote workers say that, if their current employer takes away the remote work option, they will find a new job with more flexibility.

Key insight 5: Industry turnover

Industry also plays a role in worker burnout. This bar chart shows results from a different survey, conducted by the U.S. Census, that illustrates turnover between the first quarter of 2019 and the first quarter of 2020 -only shows the top 10 industries by number of separations. Industries with more face-to-face customer interactions and physical activity had higher turnovers. The accommodation and food industry had the highest turnover for both men and women: 1.17 million men and 1.33 million women left their jobs in the year represented. Healthcare notably had a much higher turnover for women, while construction had a higher turnover for men.

These are also industries where many employees were unable to work from home during the pandemic, likely causing turnover to rise even further during the remainder of 2020.

*Average separations per sector -including all 20 sectors, between Q1 2019 and Q1 2020.

How to mitigate burnout risk

Whole-company solutions needed

While burnout is an individual condition, it should be mitigated at the whole-company level.

Wellness is not that whole-company solution, Weiss argues out in her Stanford Social Innovation Review article. Though services such as yoga and medication bring value to teams in the form of team bonding and socializing, these activities may not actually improve employee mental health, retention, and other key metrics, a 2019 study by Harvard Medical School researchers found.

Instead, companies should be intentional in measuring burnout and implementing solutions specific to their workers, Weiss says. Employers can conduct regular surveys asking similar questions to those in this quiz, along with tailored questions for the workplace, such as “Do you feel a sense of autonomy and voice in your team?” Survey responses can guide workplace leaders in developing burnout mitigation programs, as well as identifying any specific workers who may be struggling.

Transparency and feedback

One key anti-burnout strategy Weiss highlights is building a culture of transparency and feedback. Workers want to understand choices from management, whether those choices involve the metrics used to track performance or which person is getting promoted.

Open feedback channels, such as anonymous surveys and office hours held by management, can provide opportunities for employees to ask questions and make their concerns known. Team courses and trainings built around worker feedback and based on the idea of Collaborative Learning can contribute to this culture as well. When employees feel that they understand—and are consulted in—company choices, they are more likely to feel connected to the company’s shared goals and values; such a sense of community and collaboration prevents organization-wide burnout.

Flexible work policies

Remote work and other policies promoting flexibility may also combat burnout. Weiss emphasizes the value of autonomy for workers, while suggesting that guardrails are also necessary so that “workloads are evenly distributed” and “time for rest is protected and even encouraged.” For example, 360Learning internally uses a principle called “your life your way” to remind workers that they may work on any schedule and in any location, as long as key goals are met.

Flexible work policies may be especially crucial for people of color. A recent survey from Slack’s think tank, Future Forum, found that only 3% of Black workers in the U.S. wanted to return to full-time, in-person work—compared to 21% of white workers. Black workers are more likely to face stressors tied to their identities in the office, the survey found; with more flexible working environments, they are more able to focus on the job itself. Remote work thus ties into both burnout prevention and building an equitable, inclusive workplace.

The pandemic irrevocably changed how we work around the world. Employers who lean into these changes—and listen to feedback from their employees—may have less burnt out, more satisfied workers in the years to come.

Are you managing a team? You might be interested in our cheat sheet on how to talk to your teams about burnout.

Sources & Methodology

The study dataset is publicly available and accessible from Kaggle. The original source is coming from HackerEarth.

Based on completed answers from 21,626 persons who were given a burnout score, a machine learning model was trained to predict all possibilities you can provide in the survey.

The reasons to leave your job data is coming from Gallup.

The industry turnover data is coming from the Job-to-Job Flows explorer by the US Census Bureau and represents people leaving their job from Q1 2019 up to Q1 2020-pre Covid.