As our economy and society have often been insensitive to the natural order — taken her for granted and assumed an infinite supply of materials to consume. Our work has followed this basic assumption as well — that people will continue to give endlessly of themselves for those productivity margins.

A great deal of the public focus on burnout has zeroed in on the skills and deficits of individual workers all the while three decades of research has demonstrated that work environments, not individual workers, have the greatest impact on the possibility of burnout and worker turnover. Work environments!

When we constrain our self-care practices to avoid something bad from happening, we deprive self-care of its fundamental value in our lives. It turns self-care into an obligation, a purely defensive maneuver, or a method of somehow recovering a lost sense of motivation, morale, and hope for the future.

work environment factors are a major reason why people experience burnout, then why aren’t we seeing more work-related interventions? Why instead do we see a plethora of self-help resources and books that centre the topic of burnout on individual people? Why do places of employment host self-care outreach programming but not work environment... See more

Burnout, then, is an outcome of an interaction between burnout producing environmental factors and individually susceptible workers.

Dr. Maslach outlined some of the factors that research has found leads to burnout: * Excessive workloads * Lack of flexibility in schedule * Lack of worker autonomy * Destructive competition among co-workers * Getting shut out of opportunities * Loss of shared common meaning and purpose at work * Workers feeling they are not meaningful change... See more

Self-care, if it is to have continuous value in our lives, should be anchored into moving toward what we value.

From this compassion-centred framework, we are creating resilient workplaces not just resilient workers. Wellbeing becomes a focus of work environments.