Every business deals with it at one point or another: employee burnout. This year, the World Health Organization updated its definition of “burnout.” Prior, its Handbook of Diseases only loosely defined burnout as a “state of exhaustion.” Why the change? The WHO determined that the condition was a serious public concern.

The WHO recently issued a statement clarifying that it does not consider burnout a medical condition. Instead, it calls it an “occupational phenomenon” and a result of “chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.”

The fact of the matter is this: chronic workplace stress is detrimental to the health and well-being of the person dealing (or struggling to deal) with that stress. The stress that leads to burnout can be a result of being overworked — or it might be a signal that something is broken with a company’s culture and should be addressed at a management level.

 

Forbes.com, 6/10/2019