Agnieszka Nieznańska is an IT Professional with over 10 years of experience. She has worked on various international IT projects for the banking, financial and life insurance, healthcare, aviation and energy sectors.

Agnieszka is an initiator and co-author of the MBA research project entitled: “Preventing and handling burnout – the employer’s perspective”. Together with her MBA friends, she set up the “Manage Burnout” initiative – which raises awareness and educates managers on how to prevent and handle burnout in their teams and organizations. So far, over 80 managers and team members have participated in burnout workshops conducted by the Manage Burnout Team.

Agnieszka holds a double Master’s degree in Computer Science from Gdańsk University of Technology (Poland) and Blekinge Institute of Technology (Sweden). In December 2023, she completed Executive MBA at Gdańsk University of Technology.

Her interests include music (piano), sports (tennis, mountain biking, golf and sailing) and interior design.

Workshop—Preventing and Handling Burnout: The Employer's Perspective

Burnout is defined as a three dimensional syndrome which consists of: (1) emotional exhaustion, (2) depersonalization and (3) a decreased feeling of personal accomplishment (Maslach & Jackson, 1981). 48% of employees from multiple industries and companies report feeling burned out at work (Klinghoffer & Kirkpatrick-Husk, 2023). Burnout is not only an individual employee problem, but also an organizational one - thus organizations should support managers at all levels in acquiring knowledge and skills on how to prevent and handle burnout in their teams and organizations (Klinghoffer & Kirkpatrick-Husk, 2023).

This workshop fills this gap. We want to raise awareness of burnout, focusing mailny on the employer's perspective (but we also very briefly discuss an individual one). We conducted scientific and business literature review as well as qualitative and quantitative research, and based on it we prepared a 3-hour workshop which was assessed very well by the workshop participants (over 80) as well as reviewed and approved by psychologists.

The workshop consists of the following parts:
1) Burnout Assessment Tool: "Checking Your Burnout Sundrome" Questionnaire
2) Case Study: the story of John - a burn-out Team Leader
3) Presentation with definitions, statistics, cost of burnout, causes, symptoms, coping strategies - all of these interwoven with practical group exercises based on a case study about a burnt-out IT team leader
4) Satisfaction & evaluation survey of our workshop
5) Additional materials for workshop participants