Employee Burnout Has Reached a New Boiling Point
After a tumultuous few years in the labor market, employees feel stretched beyond their limits, according to a new report. And some are blaming business leaders.
By Sarah Lynch, Staff reporter
Employee burnout just keeps getting worse. And some say business leaders are to blame.
According to a new report from Glassdoor, as of July, performance reviews mentioning burnout reached the highest level since the company started tracking the data back in 2016. This marks a striking 44 percent increase over levels from February 2020.
Burnout's rapid rise started around 2021 -- interestingly, around the same time as the so-called "Great Resignation," a period marked by a tight labor market and historically high quit rates that gave workers more bargaining power.
But on the other side of that tight labor market, "burned-out workers bore the brunt of being short-staffed," the Glassdoor report stated.
Then, as the Great Resignation ended -- with quit rates tumbling back down to pre-pandemic levels -- workers then faced "layoffs and sluggish hiring in 2023 and 2024," according to the report.
That trend was especially evident in the recent July jobs report, which showed a surprising slowdown in hiring in the U.S. and a rising unemployment rate -- reaching the highest point since October 2021, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
All this change is putting pressure on workers, according to Daniel Zhao, Glassdoor's lead economist: "It does feel like employees haven't had time to catch their breath over the past few years, as we've just jumped from crisis to crisis."
Burnout isn't just a heightened problem in the U.S., though -- it's going global. About half of employees across eight countries in a recent Boston Consulting Group survey reported battling burnout.
The consequences of growing burnout are serious. Burned-out employees are "less likely to go above and beyond what is expected of them at work," according to a survey from the Society for Human Resource Management earlier this year. They're almost three times more likely to be looking for a new job, per SHRM.
These employees are also more likely to be losing faith in their companies overall, according to the Glassdoor report: Only 34 percent of reviews mentioning burnout had a "positive business outlook," compared with 54 percent for reviews not mentioning burnout.
To Zhao, it's indicative of employees seeing leaders' decisions as playing a major role in their burnout levels. "If they feel like their leaders are not giving them the resources in order to succeed, then they're going to blame that burnout on their leaders," he says.
There may be some steps business leaders can take to start to address burnout, including reallocating company resources and adapting your staffing model during the company's busy periods, Zhao says. But first, leaders need to understand what burnout looks like at their organization, specifically, and why it's happening, he notes.
"It could just be that work is very, very busy right now, or it could be because the company has gone through layoffs recently," Zhao says, "and so figuring out the reason employees feel burned out is really important, because that helps determine how you address it."
Photo: Getty Images.