ABS-MindBurnout: An agent-based simulator of the effects of mindfulness-based interventions on job burnout

Abstract Some employees suffer from burnout, and most bosses ignore this problem. Job burnout may hinder employees’ quality of life, personal accomplishment and satisfaction with life in general. It can also influence negatively the profits of the business or the organization, as the literature reveals. Mindfulness-based interventions have proven to be useful for ameliorating some aspects of burnout. By the same token, some agent-based simulator (ABSs) have been useful for predicting the influence of mindfulness programs on meditators in different aspects such as their emotions and their heart rate variability. In this context, the current work presents a novel ABS application that simulates the effects of mindfulness-based interventions on the job burnout subscales known as emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, personal accomplishment, exhaustion in general, and disengagement from work. This application allows users to define mindfulness programs without needing any computer-science technical knowledge and simulates its influence on a group of practitioners with certain features. The simulator has been tested by simulating two mindfulness-based interventions of two scenarios reported in the literature. The ABS received input from the pre-intervention burnout measures, and performed 1000 simulations for each scenario for avoiding bias from the nondeterministic behavior. The simulated outcomes referring to the post-intervention burnout measures were similar to the real ones. The mean differences, mean squared errors and mean absolute error were below 0.4% in the normalized values of all the burnout subscales reported in the two scenarios. The source code of this ABS is publicly available for guaranteeing reproducibility and allowing other researchers to extend it or reuse some of its components.