Ever heard of burnout washing? Let me show you!

The definition: Washing is all about making something look nice and clean when, underneath, it's still dirty.

But two questions are worth asking:

What are we cleaning? And more importantly: what are we cleaning it with?

Yes, we’ve become so busy calling out washing that we’ve forgotten to look at what we’re using to do the washing.

For years, burnout prevention has become a marketing argument for an entire industry of professional support services.

Posts / Coaching / Training / Resilience / Mindfulness / Stress management / Wellness apps / Conferences / Prevention workshops / Support groups.

The initiatives keep multiplying. And everyone assumes that must be good news for workers who are suffering.

And with them comes a promise: We're taking action to protect mental health.

But how effective are these initiatives, really?

In 2024, William Fleming, a researcher at the University of Oxford, published a study involving 46,336 employees across 233 British organizations.

He compared the psychological well-being of employees participating in these programs with that of employees who did not participate.

The result?

No reliable difference for most of the interventions studied.

Overall, employees participating in these programs did not report better psychological well-being than those who weren't.

And yet, these initiatives continue to be presented as solutions to suffering at work, while the numbers keep climbing...

So...

What are we cleaning?

The image of organizations (sometimes), management practices (sometimes), commercial offerings (a lot), and prevention policies (absolutely).

What are we cleaning them with?

Interventions whose advertised benefits have not been demonstrated.

That's burnout washing.

And who wants to bet that, before long, someone will hijack the term and turn it into yet another marketing slogan?

It's the process through which burnout prevention is used to give practices, narratives, or commercial offerings an appearance of responsibility for people's health, without establishing that they actually prevent what they claim to prevent.

And there's a second layer of validation at work.

By constantly presenting burnout as a phenomenon we can identify, understand, and prevent because we supposedly know its early warning signs, we reinforce the idea that burnout must be a scientifically validated entity.

Some people even believe it's a disease.

We whitewash practices with burnout. And burnout whitewashes practices.

Meanwhile, suffering at work remains very real. And because of all this, it continues to grow.

Prevention deserves better than a PR exercise.

The problem isn't just that we're selling prevention for something we haven't even properly defined. It's that selling its prevention helps convince the public that we know exactly what it is.

Scientific reference: Fleming, W. J. (2024). Employee well-being outcomes from individual-level mental health interventions: Cross-sectional evidence from the United Kingdom. Industrial Relations Journal, 55(2), 162–182.

50 years of burnout science under scrutiny: FAKING BURN-OUT (open access — just Google the title).