Burnout stems from unrealistic goals, chronic overload, and poor capacity planning. The solution is clearer priorities and more realistic expectations.
In 2021, during what many were calling the “Age of Workplace Wellness,” I led a guided meditation over Microsoft Teams. (Yes, really.) Cameras off, voices quiet, we took ten minutes to breathe together to combat the impending burnout of a major ERP implementation.
I cringe thinking about it now. It was well-intentioned, but even then, I knew I was offering a Band-Aid for a wound I was helping to inflict. Our team alone would go on to burn through eighteen folks before I rolled off the project myself, fried and exhausted.
By 2019, the World Health Organization’s definition of burnout was a “workplace phenomenon”, not a medical condition. But the cultural focus on building individual resilience in workers stubbornly persisted throughout the pandemic.
Today, most companies have moved beyond mindfulness apps and “wellness weeks,” but burnout persists: the Deloitte Workplace Burnout Survey finds that almost 70 percent of people feel that employers are not doing enough to prevent or alleviate burnout.
I’d like to think this is not because leaders don’t care, but because leaders don’t know how to confront burnout’s root cause: unsustainable expectations.
Operational Overload is the Real Root of Burnout
Eagle Hill Consulting’s 2024 state of worker burnout report finds that the top two causes of burnout are workload and staff shortages. Burnout stems from systemic issues like prioritization failures, capacity mismatches, and chronic urgency. This is not (just) about toxic culture or organizational change. It’s about unrealistic goals.
While HR does its best to align the future workforce with quarterly goals, there is still a gap in our ability to assess current capacity and prioritize our teams’ focus in the first place. Those companies that do tackle capacity management seem to inevitably fall down the administrative hole of time tracking (sometime to 15-minute increments), adding to workload demands.
Workload design is not about understanding what our teams are doing minute-by-minute. It’s about having harder conversations about what our teams shouldn’t be doing this week, month, or year.
The answer to burnout isn’t a burndown chart. It’s more realistic expectations.
How to Build Without Burnout
If you want your people to thrive while still hitting big goals, here’s what needs to change:
- Link strategy to team capacity and prioritize accordingly. Planning should reflect what teams can realistically deliver, not just what leaders hope to achieve. Those goals that are set should be appropriately prioritized (and sometimes de-prioritized) against other strategic and operational activities.
- Empower managers to say “no” and then listen. We don’t need detailed time tracking to know when our teams are overloaded. Instead, we need to empower front-line supervisors to give realistic feedback to middle- and upper-management about how much is too much.
- Stop using overwork as a solution to bad strategy. If your teams are consistently working after-hours or on weekends, it means your goals don’t consider the limitations of your workforce. Either hire more people or scale your expectations (down) appropriately.
Fixing Burnout Means Fixing the Work, Not the Workers
Driving results shouldn’t mean driving people into burnout. The best-performing teams aren’t the ones grinding the longest, they’re the ones focusing on what matters the most. Until leaders commit to clear priorities, realistic constraints, and supportive systems, they’ll keep watching their best people walk out the door.