Burnout increasing

More professions affected
The last 15 years or so, we notice a shift in the prevalence of burnout. Whereas before they were the classic servicing professions that got affected, we now see in almost any major organisation that also staff with an administrative or technical job can become burnout. The question of course rises what would cause this?

The world becomes smaller, the competion enlarges
With the rise of globalization and the explosive growth of informationtechnology, we see that companies find themselves surrounded by an ever growing competition. Many companies react with classic responses: they try to lower the costs and to increase the productivity rate of each staff member. Now especially here companies can go about quite bluntly. They demand more product, more results by the single employee, without investing much in additional methods, tools or systems that can actually help to make this possible at all. Almost every employee of a major company worldwide can tell the tale that more is expected of him than 20 years ago. To cut a long story short: the pressure of work has increased dramatically all over. That ever more employees lose track and become burnout is therefore no surprise at all.

A change of quality
Next to the rising pressure, we also see that interhuman relations and processes have gained in importance on the work floor. Many companies these days use the phrase "internal" client. This means actually that there is another department waiting for your results, to deliver themselves in time. If you define the internal relations in a company like that, you should realise in advance that you place your employees in a permanent process of negotiation. From there on we come back seamlessly to the beginning of the story: it is the relationship with others, next to a high workload, being both the causing and maintaining factor in burnout. Companies and institutions should have much more attention for these phenomena than is actually given these days.