Maslach, Schaufeli and Leiter identified six risk factors for burnout in 2001: mismatch in workload, mismatch in control, lack of appropriate awards, loss of a sense of positive connection with others in the workplace, perceived lack of fairness, and conflict between values.Although job stress has long been viewed as the main determinant of burnout, recent meta-analytic findings indicate that job stress is a weak predictor of burnout. These findings question one of the most central assumptions of burnout research. In a systematic literature review in 2014, the Swedish Agency for Health Technology Assessment and Assessment of Social Services (SBU) found that a number of work environment factors could affect the risk of developing exhaustion disorder or depressive symptoms:

People who experience a work situation with little opportunity to influence, in combination with too high demands, develop more depressive symptoms. People who experience a lack of compassionate support in the work environment develop more symptoms of depression and exhaustion disorder than others. Those who experience bullying or conflict in their work develop more depressive symptoms than others, but it is not possible to determine whether there is a corresponding connection for symptoms of exhaustion disorder. People who feel that they have urgent work or a work situation where the reward is perceived as small in relation to the effort develops more symptoms of depression and exhaustion disorder than others. This also applies to those who experience insecurity in the employment, for example concerns that the workplace will be closed down. In some work environments, people have less trouble.
However the UWES measures vigour, dedication and absorption; positive counterparts to the values measured by the MBI. It is used mainly in Germany. In 2005, TS Kristensen et al. released the public domain Copenhagen Burnout Inventory (CBI). They argued that the definition of burnout should be limited to fatigue and exhaustion. The CBI has had some use in Germany. In 2006, Shirom and Melamed with their Shirom-Melamed Burnout Measure (SMBM) conceptualized burnout in terms of physical exhaustion, cognitive weariness, and emotional exhaustion. An examination of the SMBMs emotional exhaustion subscale, however, indicates that the subscale more clearly embodies Maslachs concept of depersonalization than her concept of emotional exhaustion. This measure has seen little use. In 2010, researchers from Mayo Clinic used portions of the MBI, along with other comprehensive assessments, to develop the Well-Being Index, a nine-item self-assessment tool designed to measure burnout and other dimensions of distress in healthcare workers specifically. It has been mainly used in the United States. In 2014, Aniella Besèr et al. developed the Karolinska Exhaustion Disorder Scale (KEDS), which is used mainly in Sweden. It was designed to measure the symptoms defined by the ICD-10-SEs category for exhaustion disorder. The authors believed that those with the disorder were often initially depressed, but that this soon passed. The core symptoms of the disorder were deemed to be "exhaustion, cognitive problems, sleep disturbance". The authors also believed that the condition was clearly differentiated from both depression and anxiety.