Free tool for People directors and heads of department
Staff are stretched. What do you actually do on Monday?
Answer five quick questions about one team. You’ll get a read you can send round, two actions for staff and two for their manager in your college’s own roles, and a record entry ready to file. No staff data, nothing to sign off, under a minute.
Which team?
What are you noticing most?
These are the three dimensions of the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory (Kristensen, Borritz, Villadsen and Christensen, 2005). In the check-in, your staff answer these questions themselves.
What’s happening day to day? Tick all that apply
Which one is hitting hardest?
What’s underneath it? The working conditions behind it. Tick all that apply
Which is the biggest?
How bad does it feel?
Whatever your college calls them. We’ll write the actions using these.
Your read
Noticing most
Day to day
Underneath it
How bad it feels
Where this read sits
A read, not a measurement. In the check-in, your staff’s own answers set the band, and the band sets how many controls run each day.
GreenUnder 251 control a day: a stabiliser.
Yellow25 to 492 a day: a stabiliser and a targeted control.
Orange50 to 743 a day: a stabiliser, a targeted control and a protection add-on.
Red75 and overThe full 7-step reset, starting with notifying the Principal.
For your staff
Two things anyone in the team can do, starting today
For their manager
Two controls from the catalogue, minutes not meetings
Your record entry
The note you’d keep anyway, filled in. Add the owner and file it.
Kept week by week, an entry like this speaks to the toolkit’s test that staff wellbeing is monitored and workload is manageable (page 20).
It also speaks to the test that shortfalls are dealt with quickly and effectively (page 21).
Ofsted, Further education and skills inspection toolkit, v2.0, June 2026. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
Send this read round
To the team’s manager, your Principal, or anyone who should see it. Nothing about your staff is stored.
Send it to a colleague
A colleague at your own organisation, using work email addresses. They’ll see it came from you, and their replies come to you.
These actions assume you’ve named the right pressure. Most leaders guess workload, and often it’s something else.
Real pilot data · University Campus of Esports, named with permission
What happened when one college stopped guessing
You’ve just answered five questions about your staff. In the check-in, your staff answer for themselves: the same three questions on burnout, which driver is behind it, and all six working conditions underneath, anonymously, in about sixty seconds. Their answers become a burnout risk score for the team, never for a person, and the band sets how many controls run each day.
Week 1 burnout risk
37.9 Yellow, peak 53 Orange
What leadership assumed
Workload
What it turned out to be
Control and plan churn
Week 4 burnout risk
15.4 Green, peak 18.5
Workload was one of its best areas all along. The pressure came from mid-week changes of direction. So instead of a workload programme, managers ran a daily top three, set change windows with one channel for updates, and protected breaks. Every team ended green.
It wasn’t a one-off. Three colleges, three different causes.
Each expected workload to be the problem. In two of the three, it wasn’t. What they assumed, what it actually was, and what each one changed.
Today, to what degree was the work itself draining?
Today, to what degree was it draining to work with learners?
Today, to what degree did your work feel pointless?
Answered from “to a very low degree” to “to a very high degree”. The first three are adapted from the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory (Kristensen, Borritz, Villadsen and Christensen, 2005). Anonymous, and nothing is reported for groups under seven. That’s what lets you see burnout building team by team, as a leading indicator, rather than finding out later from absence and resignations.
Want to know for sure, team by team?
We run it for you, free for four weeks. We only take a few each term.
Across 238 check-ins from teams in three colleges, with managers running the recommended actions every week, University Campus of Esports reduced its peak burnout risk by 65% in four weeks.
Or email Ehsan@EEmber.co.uk
About these actions. Manager controls are taken from the EEmber Action Library with their catalogue references, picked the same way the full service picks them: what you’re noticing chooses the menu, what’s happening day to day chooses the cell, and what’s underneath orders the choice. Staff actions are from the EEmber individual library, with your own role names added. They are changes to the work, routes to support inside your college, and simple self-help. Nothing here is clinical, and none of it replaces professional help.
EEmber · eember.co.uk · Twinio Ltd