How to help your employees manage burnout better

As a society, a lot of us are tired. We're stressed. We're overwhelmed.

In short, a lot of Americans today are experiencing burnout.

But as the Great Resignation booms across the nation, one question remains: What are employers doing to help their employees deal?

We're narrowing in on two-plus years of a global pandemic, and a lot of people still aren't seeking the mental health solutions they so clearly need. When you break a leg or have chest pain, you go see a doctor. But when you're feeling emotional or distraught?

As a society, a lot of us were taught to just move past it and "suck it up." But, it turns out, you can't just suck it up. Mental health problems don't just go away. You can deal with them now or let them bubble up later, but they will catch up with you.

I believe we are seeing them catch up with a lot of us in the form of burnout. According to the World Health Organization, burnout is a syndrome resulting from workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. It's characterized by three dimensions: feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion, increased mental distance from one's job or feelings of negativity or cynicism related to one's job, and reduced professional efficacy.

And while the World Health Organization has outlined these dimensions, diagnosing burnout - and, really, diagnosing any mental health issue - is something we just aren't good at.

While the nation doesn't take mental health as seriously as it should, the medical community also doesn't have a standard by which they diagnose mental health conditions. Accuracy of psychiatry is low: when two psychiatrists see the same patient, the odds that they will agree on a diagnosis and path for treatment are less than 30%. On top of that, over 50% of people diagnosed with a mental disorder are victims of a "false positive," which is to say that they are diagnosed with a disorder they don't actually have.

How are we supposed to take mental health seriously if it is so heavily plagued by inaccuracy and inconsistency?

I'm a biomedical engineer and data scientist, so I may be biased, but in my opinion data is the solution. And where can we get a wealth of data that can be used to analyze and assess shifts and changes in behaviors, which may give us insights into mental health? The same place businesses and websites mine data from - consumer technology.

I partnered with a neuroscientist, a neuropsychologist and a physician in 2020, and we created Behavidence - a mental health tracking application - to address the mental health crisis in our country.

After being downloaded to a device, our technology monitors behaviors that may be linked to mental health conditions through passive digital biomarkers. By offering multiple digital phenotyping models that can predict disorders, such as depression, anxiety, ADHD and more, individuals can use Behavidence as a measurement-based outcome to monitor things like employee burnout and stress, to predict relapse of conditions, and so much more.

Mental health providers can screen and remote monitor for clinical interventions and comorbid conditions.

How you can help

Working from home and hybrid employment roles are still the trend in suburban Chicago due to persisting global health concerns. Company leaders should be aware of their employees' mental health, and they should look out for the signs of burnout.

To head off burnout and other mental health crises, companies can talk to their staff about work/life balance and setting boundaries for themselves. And, of course, companies should encourage and respect those boundaries.

Other suggestions are to discuss mindfulness. It may just be the hottest trend of 2022, and it will help employees identify stressors and strategies for overcoming them.

In the end, there are plenty of ways that we can help prevent burnout for ourselves and for our employees, but the truth of the matter is that mental health management is based in science. To truly solve the mental health crisis for our employees and ourselves, we need to implement a data-driven strategy so we can eradicate the inaccuracies and inconsistencies that prevent people from getting the treatments they need.

Our goal with Behavidence is to provide that data to medical professionals, but it goes beyond that. We also want to help users understand their own behavioral and mental health patterns. Our app allows users to monitor changes in their mental health by reviewing their daily mental health similarity scores. If a user experiences a mental decline, the app will begin to show changes in the digital behavioral metrics - oftentimes, before the employee even notices symptoms.

Early detection can help users adjust their behaviors to prioritize rest or reach out to a medical professional before the condition worsens. And the longer a user has the app, the clearer the data becomes, enabling more accurate diagnoses, better treatment plans, and less extreme mental health issues.

What it all boils down to is mental health is important, but we won't be able to solve the mental health concerns of our employees - and of people in general - until we start looking at mental health from a data-driven perspective.

• Dr. Girish Srinivasan is co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at Behavidence.