Cause and Prevention of Burnout in Human Services

Causes and Prevention of Burnout in Human Services Staff

Sherri Porter

Building Community in Organizations/BSHS 462

November 8, 2014

Jeffrey Codner

Causes and Prevention of Burnout in Human Service Staff

The human service organization has had many issues with staff burnout, which has an impact on their mental and personal health. The job of a human service worker can be hectic, due to dealing with an overabundance of case loads, excessive over time, and conflicting schedules with home and work. This paper will describe the cultural, individual, supervisory, organizational, and social support factors that can cause burnout. Various methods will be discussed on the prevention of burnout for an individual, and how a human service manager should handle an employee that is experiencing burnout.

“Burnout is a physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion resulting from the involvement with individuals in emotionally demanding situations” (Lewis, Packard, & Lewis, 2007). There are many factors that can cause burnout but the major factors are emotional exhaustion, sense of depersonalization, and feelings of not accomplishing goals for your clients.

Cultural, individual, supervisory, organizational, and social support factors can all lead to burnout. Individual burnout is caused by personality factors that may affect job performance. Burnout can be caused organizationally due to little incentives and extreme conflict among co-workers. The supervisory and social support factors related to burnout is having no part in making decisions. A cultural burnout is caused due to policies that are not including employees with diverse beliefs. There are many things that can cause burnout such as lack of control, work overload, breakdown in the community, and lack of rewards for those who have excellent job performance.

Human service managers have to be informed of employees suffering from burnout, due to their work environment. A human service manager...