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One of things that has been bugging me for the last few months is that some of my friends, as well as people around the office of several friends are having to deal more and more with absentee colleagues. Not because there are not enough people in the office, or not enough qualified people around.. but because these colleagues have just had enough. They have suffered something called burnout. Until I faced it myself, I did not take it seriously, but since then I have been reading up on it. The World Health Organization lists is as a stress related disease under Z73.0, under Problems related to Life-Management Issues. And there are a million articles around about what causes it and how to avoid it.

The one thing that struck me the most is, that it often catches engaged and dedicated people who are hard workers and go far beyond the call of duty. They work hard, often without recognition, without appreciation and sometimes even isolated from their colleagues. They have too much to do, find it hard to share their thoughts and reach out or even find suitable discussion partners amongst their peers inside of an organization. It seems that the ways of working, more disconnected, more distributed, working from home, without the direct support of colleagues may be a factor as well as it can increase the felt isolation

There are of course other reasons for burnout, but I would like to concentrate on those, and with the help of this community start a little research project. I would like to look at the impact of social Media on the reasons for Burnout. This is not about Social Media leading to burnout, which I am sure also is possible, trying to keep your many different channels fed 7 times a day with something more or less intelligent to say.

I am looking for empirical and research evidence that the use of Social Media, the sharing amongst peers, the communication and transparency can actually prevent Burnout and make return into a normal working environment easier. I do not think that this is a trivial issue as Burnout costs society billions of dollars every year. [according to research by the leading private insurance company in Australia, they put the figure at AUS$14B ] Maybe we are even barking up the wrong tree when we keep saying that it is about people and culture change… it may be about keeping our workforce sane.

During a recent conversation with someone who has just come out of depression and Burnout, this person said the following. “Social Media helped me getting connected without having to face my real social fabric and still interface casually without having to share my pain. […]At the end, it really helped getting back into the game without a too deep fracture.”

Now I am not saying going on Twitter will in any way avoid Burnout, but maybe having a social environment where you can continue to function and have more control and maybe more appreciation can help in some cases.

As I am not a medical doctor or psychologist, I am looking for such people who are interested in working together on doing some research on this. I am also looking for people that have suffered Burnout and are active in Social Media and Social Networking both inside and outside the organization.

If you are interested in talking part, please send me an email to research@hkkconsulting.com, stating your brief story, either as a therapist or a sufferer.

I look forwards to hearing from you. The research will be published next year, but I will keep talking about it here as I believe it is of interest to a lot more people than we think !