Burnout test: workplace exhaustion

Workplace burnout is described by the World Health Organization in ICD-11, under code QD85, as a work-related phenomenon rather than a medical condition. This free self-observation questionnaire puts 24 situations to you, all covering the past three months, and places your answers on four dimensions in about seven minutes.

Why say workplace exhaustion rather than just burnout? In everyday English the word is used loosely, for parental exhaustion, athletic exhaustion or study fatigue. The definition the World Health Organization adopted in 2019 is narrower and refers specifically to chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. This questionnaire follows that narrower meaning and covers work only.

What does the questionnaire measure? Four dimensions, six questions each. Exhaustion covers emotional and physical tiredness that rest no longer repairs. Mental distance covers pulling away from the job and from the people in it, together with the loss of meaning that comes with it. Reduced sense of efficacy covers the impression of no longer getting anything right, an impression that does not always match what you actually produce. Resources cover your decision latitude, the support you receive and the recognition your work gets. On those last two dimensions most items are worded positively and then scored in reverse: the more you recognise yourself in them, the lower the score.

Where do the four dimensions come from? The first three follow the structure set out by the World Health Organization in 2019: energy depletion, increased mental distance or cynicism towards one's job, and reduced professional efficacy. The fourth comes from a different research tradition, the one that relates job demands to decision latitude, formalised by Robert Karasek in 1979: it is not the load on its own that wears people down, it is load without room to manoeuvre. The items themselves were written for Brain Quiz. No published scale is reproduced here, neither the Maslach inventory, distributed under a commercial licence, nor the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory, nor the Burnout Assessment Tool.

Do you need a salaried job? No. The items refer to your work, which covers freelancing, running a business, studying and regularly caring for someone close to you. We assumed no office, no fixed hours and no line manager, because the wear described in the research does not depend on employment status.

How is the score calculated? Each answer is worth 0 to 4 points. Questions carry a weight of 1 to 3 depending on their place in their dimension. The total is rescaled to 100 and placed in one of four bands. Each dimension also gets its own percentage, which gives you a profile rather than a single figure: two people with the same total can be describing very different situations. The weights and the thresholds were set by the Brain Quiz editorial team. They come from no population calibration, and a score of 70 carries no statistical threshold value.

Why a three-month window? Because workplace exhaustion builds slowly. A hard week says very little. A trend across a quarter says a great deal more. Every question covers the same period, which makes the answers comparable with one another and lets you take the questionnaire again later to observe a real change.

Who is it for? Anyone who works, in whatever form. Your score and the band text appear immediately, with no account and no payment; the reading of the four dimensions comes with the subscription.

What this questionnaire does not say. It does not tell workplace exhaustion apart from a depressive state, whose signs overlap heavily. It does not measure how long the situation has lasted. It does not examine your actual working conditions, which call for a proper workplace assessment. And it is a reminder that in the international classification burn-out is not an illness but a work-related phenomenon. This questionnaire can neither confirm nor rule out a disorder.

What should you do with a high score? Talk about it. Your family doctor, an occupational physician or a psychologist can look at the situation, rule out other causes and suggest what comes next. The result is not a verdict, it is a concrete starting point for that conversation: you arrive with four dimensions and specific situations rather than an impression that is hard to put into words. To go further, our guide on burnout and depression compares the two pictures, and our guide on self-assessment scales explains what the published inventories measure and why we do not reproduce them.