Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI): How to Measure and Prevent Job Burnout

Psychologists search for the Maslach Burnout Inventory because they want the instrument. HR people search for it because they have a practical question: does my company have a burnout problem, and where?

This guide is for HR. I explain what the MBI measures and what it does not, why you cannot simply paste it into a form, and how I teach HR teams to measure burnout with the tools a company already has.

If you want to start right now, go to the free burnout signals checklist. It is my own checklist, not the MBI.

The Maslach Burnout Inventory, or MBI, is a questionnaire created by the psychologist Christina Maslach and her colleagues. In the field of understanding and diagnosing burnout she is one of the leading names, and the MBI is the instrument most people mean when they say “a burnout test”.

Two things matter for HR before you go any further:

• It is a psychological instrument. As I say in my course, it was built for psychologists working with their clients more than for a business that wants a quick picture of its departments.
• It is copyrighted. The MBI is licensed by its publisher, Mind Garden. The questions, the scoring key and the norms are not free to copy. That is why you will not find them in this article, and why a version copied from a random website into your survey tool is a bad idea.

The MBI does not give one burnout number. It describes burnout as three things that can move separately:

• Emotional exhaustion — the feeling that work has used up a person’s emotional energy.
• Depersonalization, or cynicism — a distant, detached attitude to the people one works with or to the work itself.
• Reduced personal accomplishment — a falling sense that one is competent and that the work achieves anything.

Even if you never buy the instrument, this three-part view is useful for HR: burnout is not only tiredness. If you only look for tired people, you miss the detached ones and the ones who have stopped believing their work is any good.

The two words are used together so often that they blur. In my course I separate them like this.

Stress is usually over-engagement. Emotions are over-reactive, and behaviour becomes anxious or hyperactive.

Burnout is the opposite: disengagement. Emotions go flat. A person becomes detached from the work and feels helpless or hopeless about it.

Burnout most often comes after stress. Engagement is good; when there is too much of it and people do not rest, it turns into stress, and then into burnout.

For measurement this means one thing: an engagement survey and a burnout survey look at the same line from different ends, so read them together.

You can, if you license it and have someone qualified to interpret the results.

But an HR team usually needs something else first. Not a psychological profile of each employee. It needs to see in which department the problem is. In my experience the problem usually sits with the employees of one department, because the cause is a manager, a process or the environment that team works in.

So in the course I use two company surveys instead:

• A quick screen. A short questionnaire that I simplified for business use. It answers one question: is there a problem, yes or no, and in which unit. The report fits on one or two pages.
• A detailed survey on causes. It scans the company section by section: how work is organised, the physical environment, time pressure, the manager, colleagues, work and private life, trust in management, wellbeing and offensive behaviour. The base for it is StressAssess, a survey developed by a Canadian organisation. The full version has about 100 questions, so I use all of it only when the company openly recognises the problem and people are ready to answer. Otherwise I delete the sections where I already know things are fine.

Whatever you choose, three rules stay the same: the survey is anonymous, the results are read by group and never by person, and nobody calls the result a diagnosis.

In the course I use a risk-management model with four steps: recognise, assess, control, evaluate. It is a universal risk-management model, and I apply it to burnout as to any other workplace risk.

1. Recognise. Look at signs and symptoms, work with metrics and find the stressors at work. You do this before any survey.

2. Assess. Determine the current state with questionnaires.

3. Control. Training and structural changes that reduce stress.

4. Evaluate. Check whether the change you wanted is actually happening.

It is tempting to jump straight to step two and send a survey. Step one costs nothing and tells you where to send it.

In the company’s numbers. The signs I list in the first class of the course: absenteeism and presenteeism (people coming to work sick) are going up; there are more errors, complaints and internal conflicts; quality of work, morale and retention are going down; health-related costs are growing. Two more signs are about people: employees with an exaggerated sense of responsibility, and employees who play down what they have achieved.

In the records. Questions from the manager training: are there departments or roles with higher sick leave than others? Are people not using annual leave because of workload? Are there common themes in complaints? What do the overtime records show?

In behaviour. The course groups these signs into physical, behavioural and social. The ones a manager can honestly notice: people look exhausted and mention bad sleep; they catch every cold; they become forgetful and their decisions get worse; they are irritable. The social signs are the ones companies misread most often. “Our employees do not want to come to team events” is usually treated as a problem with the events. Often it is a sign that people are worn out and want silence. The last one on my list is excessive tolerance: a person stops reacting to what bothers them and simply puts up with it.

A few working rules from the course:

• Ask for the department. The whole point is to see where the problem is. A company-wide average hides it.
• Response rate. I treat 30% of employees as a normal level. In a company with fewer than 100 people you need about twice that.
• Length. For a regular survey, aim for one screen. The long survey on causes is the exception, and that is why I shorten it whenever I can.
• Reminders. About three is the optimum.
• Baseline, then pulse. A detailed survey tells you where you are on one date. It does not tell you whether things are getting better or worse. For that, add a short regular pulse survey; a simple online form is enough to start. See my guide to employee pulse surveys and the list of pulse survey questions.

And one rule about honesty. If you used a licensed instrument, name it in the report. If you used your own questions, say so and do not call them the MBI.

After a quick screen the report is one or two pages; after the full survey on causes, a detailed one. The sections I include:

1. Purpose of the survey — why we did it.
2. Target audience — who is affected.
3. Sample.
4. Methods.
5. Findings for each tool, with tables and charts and, where possible, a split by demographics.
6. Summary of findings, if you used more than one tool.
7. Recommendations.
8. Next steps.

To get from findings to recommendations, I ask four questions about every number:

1. Here are the numbers — what do they tell us?
2. How is this different from the norm?
3. How can we bring it back to normal?
4. What actions could be taken?

Translate it into money. Management reacts to a budget line faster than to a survey score. In the course I use a figure from a Deloitte study: stress and burnout cost a company about 7% of annual pay.

Cost per year = average monthly salary × 12 × 7% × headcount

My example: 500 employees with an average salary of $750 a month. 750 × 12 × 0.07 × 500 = $315,000, or roughly $300,000 a year. The same study gives an average return of five to one on money invested in this area. Divide by five and you get a working budget of about $60,000, or $120 per employee per year. It is an estimate for the conversation with management, not an audited number.

Measurement without action makes things worse: people told you how they feel and nothing happened. The course uses a hierarchy of controls with three levels, and the order matters.

1. At the source. Redesign the tasks or the environment so the work itself does not create the stress. Change duties, workload, the authority to make decisions and the working conditions. Add flexible working arrangements and more personal support.

2. Along the way. Health promotion, relaxation techniques, stress and conflict management skills, screening for early signs, better communication.

3. At the employee. Counselling services and an employee assistance programme for people who are already under strain, and support with the return to work.

Start from level one: that is where the cause is.

The causes themselves I reduce to three:

• The person does not love the work.
• The work is poorly organised. This one is on the company.
• Lack of energy. The person spends their energy the wrong way, and the company can help here too.

So my formula against burnout has three parts: a dream job, an anti-stress culture and the right energy. A dream job is when three things meet: a person does what they love, they are good at it, and they are paid properly for it.

And one condition without which the rest does not work: a respectful workplace. A company that does nothing about people who insult and bully others will not fix burnout with relaxation techniques.

If you want the whole system — the two surveys, the audit of causes, the manager training, the anti-stress culture and the reporting — it is in my Stress and Burnout Course: Well-Being Training for HR.