Mental Health: Women and young people suffer more from exhaustion at work, research shows

A survey by the mental health platform Zenklub showed that women and young people aged 25 to 34 are the professionals who suffer the most from exhaustion and constant worry at work.

The study was based on the IBC (Corporate Well-Being Index), which Zenklub developed last year with its corporate education, medicine and psychology teams in partnership with psychometricians from UFRJ (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro). .

The instrument assesses the aspects of relationship with leaders, relationship with colleagues, conflicts, exhaustion, constant concern, disconnection from work, volume of demand, autonomy and participation and clarity of responsibilities.

“The objective is that, with this data, companies have an overview of the mental health of their employees and can improve the organizational culture”, says Rui Brandão, CEO and co-founder of the platform.

In the survey, carried out between March 24 and 31 of this year, 500 people —269 men and 231 women, aged 18 to 70 years old— answered a questionnaire with 31 questions about well-being at work. Professionals in positions of collaborators and leadership, from the five regions of Brazil, who work in areas such as industry, commerce and services participated.

The result showed that the aspects of exhaustion and constant concern are 69% relevant for Brazilian workers, that is, they are the data that most impact the national average (61.7%). When the facet is exhaustion, addressing outstanding characteristics of burnout, the rate is 48.1%.

Despite revealing an improvement of 10.6% in relation to the first survey (58.7%), carried out last year, the data still brings a warning to companies about the risk of burnout for their workers.

The constant worry index, on the other hand, is 41.8 and reflects the scenario of people who cannot disconnect from work after hours, take breaks and even feel guilty when taking time off or vacation. The data also improved by 4.7 points compared to the previous survey (46.5), but remains a factor that impacts employee well-being.

In terms of gender, women had the worst results in terms of exhaustion (53.3%), constant concern (47.3%) and volume of demand (37.3%). When compared to men, the average difference between the facets is approximately 9 percentage points.

A similar picture happened by age group. While young people between 25 and 34 years old had the worst rates of exhaustion (52.6%), people between 45 and 70 years old had better results in all comparable facets.

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