Beyond burnout: Why changing how we talk about employee well-being could help solve it
Earlier this year, when Brittany Schmaling’s boss asked her to measure burnout, she wondered how that was even doable.
Although she’s a trained industrial/organizational psychologist and data analyst principal at the HR tech company Dayforce — someone whose world is all about metrics, statistics and assessing human behavior — she admits she was stumped.
Fast-forward, and her research around what she has dubbed “work energy” aims to challenge what we thought we always knew about people hitting their limit.
It couldn’t come at a more critical moment for HR leaders. The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) revealed in its report “Employee Mental Health in 2024” that 44% of 1,405 workers surveyed feel burned out at work. Those feelings are particularly common with the crunch of Q4 and holiday season upon us.
But while it may be a favorite buzzword, Schmaling contends we’ve been getting burnout all wrong — starting with the definition. “In the popular media, when they talk about burnout, they’re talking about being overextended,” she said. “True burnout has real, physical consequences.”
Schmaling is not alone in thinking we should reframe burnout.
“There’s a general perception that burnout is just about doing too much. However, burnout is also about feeling like your effort doesn’t matter or align with something meaningful,” said Cindy Kravitz, director of leadership development at the medical tech company Stryker. “When people feel so drained they can’t get out of bed, they’re often lacking connection, purpose and recognition. In trying to address this, they might take on more work to try to find this missing purpose. It becomes a vicious cycle.”
“Solving this issue requires more than buzzwords,” said executive coach Kelly Meerbott. “It calls for a paradigm shift in how we define productivity, prioritize human sustainability and reimagine the modern workplace.”
The faces of work energy
Schmaling says what we commonly think of as burnout actually encompasses five distinct states: burned out, engaged, disengaged, ineffective and overextended. And while the burnout rate of companies is routinely estimated to be as high as 80% — with one recent study putting it at 88% — she has determined that true burnout affects just 15% of organizations.
The distinction isn’t just academic; it could be elemental to understanding and ensuring the employee’s well-being and their place in the organization.
Why? Because different interventions are used for those who are literally burned out versus those who are merely taxed. While overextended employees might require better boundaries and workload management, those suffering from burnout typically require more drastic solutions, such as a change in job, company or boss.
The stakes for getting it right are high. Burnout — or at least what’s perceived as burnout — has become an epidemic, particularly among younger employees. In its research, Deloitte found that nearly half of millennials have left a job specifically because they felt burned out. Meanwhile, the cost of replacing an employee can run as much as double their salary, according to researcher Josh Bersin.
Scores of solutions, worse-off workers
There is no shortage of remedies for burnout. Employee wellness programs that aim to minimize employee stress have become a staple of workplace benefits. An Amazon search turns up more than 10,000 titles devoted to the topic, as are numerous articles, podcasts and seminars.
All the while, the state of employee well-being has never been worse. A Gallup survey of 151 CHROs from large companies revealed that, despite employers’ efforts, the percentage of workers who strongly agree that their organization cares about them hovers around a record low of 21%.
It’s little wonder, then, that the efficacy of wellness programs has been called into question. It made headlines earlier this year when an Oxford researcher found that, on the whole, they do not work, leading one behavioral scientist to dub them “the $8 billion con.”
Marissa Alert, a clinical health psychologist and founder of MDA Wellness, a workplace mental health service, suggests that organizations could do a better job of steering employees toward the help they require, identifying “a significant gap between making these resources available and ensuring employees know how and when to access them” — a disconnect that can exacerbate burnout.
Meanwhile, HR tech companies continue to develop products to help employers identify and address burned-out team members. This month, Prodoscore introduced an AI-powered tool, Retention Risk, to detect the warning signs of employee disengagement.
Schmaling says Dayforce is working on a “burnout tracker” that will enable people managers to benchmark against industry standards, providing a detailed breakdown of employee states of mind by department, gender, tenure and age group.
The suggestion: that there are as many roads to burnout as there are solutions for solving it.
“People are a box of chocolates,” as Schmaling puts it. “Everyone’s different.”