The Six Most Common Reasons For Burnout

Empower managers to lead with grace, confidence, and authenticity

The manager’s role to assess and address employee burnout is critical. Yet most managers are not aware of what to look for — or how to mitigate it. In this second installment of a three-part series focused on the HR Manager’s Guide to Burnout in the New Workplace, you’ll learn about the six most common reasons for employee burnout. You'll also gain practical strategies to help your organization’s managers feel confident when having difficult burnout conversations with their teams.

“Employee burnout” is far too vague a term for managers to move toward proper diagnosis and subsequent solutions. Conversations around employee burnout often produce an abundance of perspectives, observations, and proposed solutions. And while many may be tremendously helpful, they have an unintended consequence of being overwhelming.

This is why we need to better focus the conversation around the reasons burnout happens. Doing so empowers managers to more quickly identify causes and symptoms, and solve the ailment.

Let’s explore the six most common reasons for employee burnout, along with practical strategies to help your organization’s managers address these challenges head-on with grace, empathy, and confidence.

When deadlines are aggressively set, the ability to get work done on time is a challenge. The stressors of “figuring it out” on time, while preserving quality, have an impact on employees. This stress is only compounded when employees are met with various obstacles that prohibit their ability to meet deadlines.

Addressing deadline burnout often falls on the managers involved in the project or work associated with the deadline. But this is also why addressing deadline burnout is a challenge: Most employees just don’t feel comfortable pushing back on deadlines or raising their hand for help. For this reason, the manager must identify the symptoms early on and take swift action before the burnout becomes too great and threatens employee wellness and work product.

Action, however, does not always involve moving the deadline. In fact, immediately moving the deadline, though the most common response, is seldom the most helpful. Managers should instead engage with employees to acknowledge the situation, show compassion, ask questions, and provide support while working toward a solution that ensures a deadline can be met when a deadline shift is not possible.

Team-wide exhaustion happens when the collective group has reached levels of exhaustion that are uncomfortable and further perpetuated by the shared exhaustion of others. This exhaustion, also referred to as “culture burnout,” doesn’t necessarily stem from long hours, but instead team-wide dynamics that deplete employees’ energy, engagement, and commitment levels required to achieve their goals. Culture burnout within a team can quickly spread to surrounding teams and become pervasive throughout the organization.

Alleviating culture burnout takes a series of deliberate, consistent, and committed steps from managers to build back trust with their teams. To begin, managers need to work through the complexity by sorting out its causes, whether it’s unclear communication from leadership to employees, distrust/lack of transparency, or inconsistency in the strategic direction and approach of work. Worth noting is that the causes can be interrelated, and therefore more than one may exist.

Depending on what the cause(s) of culture burnout is, managers should work with the broader leadership team on what actions can be taken to communicate with the impacted group, including collecting feedback, sharing understanding, and committing to improving the circumstances.

Personal burnout is different from culture burnout because it impacts a single individual within the workplace. Personal burnout requires careful attention and empathy from managers, especially because the severity of this type of burnout can threaten employee wellness and health, and necessitates ongoing support from those surrounding an individual. And as we’ve discussed, burnout can be compounded by several factors. It is, therefore, critically important for managers to address this type of burnout quickly so it does not trickle into team dynamics and lead to greater risk across a group (i.e. culture burnout).

Before managers can start to explore solutions to mitigate personal burnout, they need to understand what causes it. Some of the causes of personal burnout include role misalignment and fatigue, unclear career pathing or performance feedback, or even external extenuating circumstances that put pressure on the ability to focus and perform in the workplace.

Because individuals are unique, there can be various causes at play — and they likely vary from person to person, so the solutions will likely need to be unique, as well. Managers must engage with employees individually to acknowledge the situation, show compassion and empathy, ask questions, and provide support while working toward an immediate solution.

But if an immediate solution isn’t feasible — which can happen — managers should establish a clear timeline for revisiting the conversation.

Driven by someone’s commitment and dedication to a topic, passion burnout surfaces when the deliberate and chosen exposure to a particular skill or topic becomes too strong and results in the desire to detach from the content.

Passion is something we aim to foster in our organizations, so addressing passion burnout requires managers to have a high level of awareness and sensitivity. The key to maintaining passion while reducing burnout is to provide a clear scope of work and desired set of objectives. Through clear direction and time-bound milestones, employees can more efficiently stay focused while channeling their interests to achieve outcomes. Without direction, as well as distant or ambiguous deadlines, employees can get so deeply immersed in their specialty areas that they burnout before reaching the goal.

Skill burnout is the result of individuals facing skill deficiencies — or skill excess — in their specific roles. Ultimately, this type of burnout leads to employees feeling frustrated and misplaced within the organization.

Skill burnout is identified at the individual level and requires manager intervention to help address it. When skill gaps exist at a broader level across teams or departments (i.e., introduction of new technology across an entire function), leadership support may also be required. Skill deficiencies can be uncomfortable and trigger insecurities for employees, so they must be handled delicately.

Managers should connect with their direct reports to explore any skill gaps/surpluses that may exist for their particular work. A component of this conversation should also address where individual employees may feel overqualified and seek greater challenges.

Open discussions around skill burnout are the first step, and this should be swiftly followed with a commitment to additional learning opportunities or career mobility for those ready and qualified for additional experiences.

Alignment burnout stems from dissonance that exists between what something is intended to be and what something is. This disconnect can create ambiguity, anxiety, and frustration that — over time — leads to burnout. For example, limited, unclear or inconsistent goal-setting, or the absence of job descriptions and career paths across the organization are two examples of the common causes of alignment burnout.

To address alignment burnout, managers can follow two approaches, depending on the company’s ability to rapidly align versus slowly make adjustments due to issues across the organization. For teams experiencing alignment burnout and are capable of rapid adjustment, managers need to bring the group together to acknowledge the burnout sentiment and provide space for shared concerns. It’s critical to get an understanding of where and why the confusion may exist. From there, managers should strive to establish alignment among the various efforts and priorities.

However, some teams may be slow to adjust because of alignment issues across the organization, and this can require additional steps beyond a team meeting. For managers, it’s essential to understand your team, connect with other team managers to establish understanding, and host one or multiple meetings to decide on expectations. From there, managers can communicate these expectations back to their team while acknowledging that alignment may not always equate to making everyone happy.

These six reasons for burnout are not mutually exclusive. The prevalence of one type of burnout is likely to inspire other burnout types. This is how burnout compounds and becomes an organization-wide issue that becomes increasingly more difficult to remedy overtime

In the final part of our series, we’ll reveal the six ways workforce analytics can help avoid burnout, and provide guidance on how to glean meaningful insights from the data.