During the successful completion of his MBA, Thomas Leyens, an industrial engineer, opened his eyes on the causes and dangers of burnout. Wide enough to co-write his thesis on this topic, surrounded by extremely competent academics and co-writers. His career in the military and then in the defense industry, experiencing the evolution of a small company growing to fast with the constrains of a multinational, helped him recognized the symptoms of the disease of the 21th century. Being the Product Line Architect of ammunition for his company and working with people from different cultures, he experienced himself some of the managerial difficulties leading to burnout

In his private time, Thomas is passionate about cycling with many years of racing behind him and photography.

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

Co-facilitated with Agnieszka Nieznańska.