Worker Burnout: Tactics for Managing Burned-Out Employees

What Is Worker Burnout?

Burnout is classified as an ‘occupational phenomenon’ by the World Heatlh Organization and is typically a result of chronic workplace stress not being managed effectively. Employees experiencing burnout will often feel a sense of mental, physical, and/or emotional exhaustion, have a negative perception of their work, and be less productive.

What Are The Symptoms Of Employee Burnout?

Burnout can cause a range of symptoms, including mental, physical, and behavioural symptoms:

• Physical symptoms include persistent fatigue, headaches, disrupted sleep, and being more susceptible to illness.
• Emotional and cognitive symptoms include feeling detached from work, increased negativity about job responsibilities or colleagues, difficulty concentrating, and a lack of confidence in their ability to carry out their role.
• Behavioural symptoms include withdrawing from colleagues, procrastinating or avoiding tasks that seem unmanageable or stressful, frequent mood swings and impulsivity.

How do you know if your employees are experiencing burnout?

As a manager, it can be challenging to identify symptoms of burnout in your team. While you can’t always tell what your team members are thinking or feeling, you can look for behavioural changes and patterns that might indicate they are experiencing worker burnout:

• Performance: Reliable team members who suddenly start missing deadlines they would usually hit, producing lower-quality work that needs more correction, and exhibiting difficulty completing tasks that should be routine to them may be experiencing burnout.
• Attendance: Individuals who show a rise in short-notice absences, take more sick days on Mondays and Fridays, and start arriving late and leaving early may be burned out.
• Withdrawal: Team members who used to frequently contribute in meetings may become quieter in team discussions, avoid video calls, and offer shorter answers than usual if they are feeling burned out.
• Change in tone: Burned-out employees might be more irritable than usual, express negative opinions or feelings about work that seem out of character and appear less engaged.
• Working hours: Employees working late at night or not taking lunch breaks can be a sign that workload is becoming overwhelming and boundaries have started to slip, indicating burnout might become more likely.

On their own, these signals might not indicate burnout and may have other explanations. However, if you notice changes in any or all of these behaviours that persist for an extended period, opening a conversation with the impacted team member can help address potential issues before they become larger problems.

What Causes Employees To Burn Out?

Employee burnout is rarely caused by a single factor. It usually builds up over a period of time due to a combination of factors, such as:

• Feeling overwhelmed by their workload or having little control over how or when their work gets done.
• Having unclear expectations about what their employer wants out of their work or how to progress in their role.
• Feeling unsupported or isolated at work and being unsure about who they can turn to.
• Finding it difficult to establish work-life boundaries and frequently working into the evenings, weekends, or while on annual leave.
• Not being rewarded or recognised for good work or achievements.
• Misalignment between personal values and company policies or job responsibilities.

What Are The Impacts Of Burnout At Work?

If left unaddressed, the impacts of burnout don’t stay contained to the one individual. It can affect an individual’s health, relationships with friends and family, and the wider team at work.

How burnout affects employees

The effects of burnout can show up across different aspects of an individual’s life:

Health

Burnout can cause poor sleep quality, higher levels of anxiety and depression, and increased vulnerability to physical illnesses. This is because prolonged stress can wear down the body’s ability to recover.

Relationships

Feelings of exhaustion and negative thoughts don’t stay contained to the office. Burnout can cause individuals to feel emotionally strained and more irritable, which can impact relationships with colleagues, friends, family, and partners.

Work performance

Despite putting in longer hours, burned-out employees often produce lower-quality work. This can create a difficult cycle where performance drops, pressure to catch up increases, and burnout worsens.

How burnout affects employers

Employees experiencing burnout can also have a significant impact on their employer:

Absences

HSE data suggests that in 2024/25, work-related anxiety, stress, and depression resulted in 22.1 million lost working days across Great Britain. Employees dealing with burnout are more likely to take time off work to recover, meaning employers are left to find someone to cover their work, deadlines are harder to meet, and remaining staff members have to pick up the extra work with short notice and no formal plan in place.

Presenteeism

Not every employee experiencing burnout will take time off work. Some may continue to work despite not being able to fulfil their job responsibilities as effectively as they otherwise would. This can result in lower-quality work output, a loss in productivity, and other team members having to correct or redo work that is not at the expected standard.

Staff turnover

Burnout is a common reason why employees choose to leave roles they are otherwise good at or well suited to. This can leave employers with skill gaps, as their team members take their experience and industry knowledge with them when they leave. Recruiting, onboarding, and training new staff members can become a time-consuming and costly process for organisations.

Team morale and costs

Burnout in one individual won’t always stay isolated. Colleagues absorb the extra workload and morale across the team can dip. Not only does this risk other members of the team becoming burned out, but it also causes other costs to add up:

• Overtime pay
• Agency cover costs
• Management time for managing the fallout of absences or leavers

Tactics For Managing Burned-Out Employees

Recognising burnout and understanding its impact is important, but things won’t change or improve without taking action. We have outlined some actionable tactics for employees and employers looking to manage burnout at work:

Managing burnout as an employee

As an employee, it is important to advocate for yourself, set clear work-life boundaries, and understand what kind of support is already available for you.

Talk to a trusted manager or colleague

Talking to someone about how you are feeling, whether that’s your manager, HR team, or another trusted colleague, can help turn a sense of struggle into something more concrete that can be addressed and worked on.

Opening up a conversation about the challenges you are facing can result in measures being put in place to help reduce stress. For example, workload might be adjusted, temporary changes to working hours may be agreed, or you might be signposted to professional support.

Set clear boundaries around workload and hours

One of the main causes of burnout is the breakdown of work-life boundaries. That means it is important to re-establish those boundaries, which can help improve work-life balance and reduce feelings of burnout or stress.

For example, you can start by reintroducing small but specific limits like setting a time to stop checking your emails or making sure you step away from your desk for a proper lunch break. This helps build up the amount of personal time you have away from work to recover.

Use support that is available to you

Many organisations have mental health support in place for employees, but this can go unused if employees don’t know it’s there or how to access it. Asking your manager or HR team about the provisions in place can give you a better understanding of where you can go to access professional support.

Know when time away is the right step

Sometimes, you might need time away from work to recover from burnout. If you have been experiencing burnout for a prolonged period of time, it is not getting better despite adjustments being made, and it is impacting you in all areas of your life, it might be time to speak to a GP.

A GP can provide a professional assessment of your symptoms and give you a fit note if they believe time off work would be best for recovery.

Managing burnout as an employer

As an employer, it is important to support burned-out employees by addressing the immediate situation, as well as the root causes.

Have regular check-ins with your team

Establishing regular 1-1 meetings with your team members can help you spot early warning signs of burnout or other wellbeing challenges they are facing. These 1-1s should go beyond regular project updates, and you should take the opportunity to ask how your employee is feeling about work and managing their workload.

It is important to genuinely listen to what your team are saying and validate how they are feeling without immediately trying to problem-solve. This provides a safe space for issues to surface while they are still manageable and allows you to work together with your team to establish strategies to address them.

Understand and address the main sources of burnout

Listening to your team can help you understand the core issues that are causing stress, anxiety, and burnout. Knowing the main problems will allow you to address them at the source, on an organisational level, and minimise the risk of them causing burnout again in the future.

Reviewing worker capacity against realistic output, clarifying role responsibilities and expectations, and outlining what success looks like for individual roles can all help address the causes of burnout rather than only the symptoms.

Offer structured and professional support

Offering a range of structured mental health provisions can help burned-out employees better manage their symptoms and teach managers how to effectively identify and address worker burnout.

For example, mental health training can make managers feel more confident in dealing with burned-out members of the team, and providing employees with access to therapy and counselling allows them to address their symptoms more effectively without having to take time off work.

Establish clear and supported return-to-work processes

When you have an employee returning to work after taking leave for burnout, it is important to manage that process effectively. Phased returns, adapted working hours, adjusted workloads, and clear check-in schedules can all help make the return-to-work process easier and less stressful to deal with.

Learn more about managing return-to-work processes.

How Do You Prevent Worker Burnout?

Preventing employee burnout is more about reviewing and updating organisational practices, rather than solely implementing individual wellbeing initiatives.

This can include monitoring workload and capacity on a team level, normalising conversations about work stress, and developing an integrated intervention approach to workplace mental health that spans across the organisation.

Wellbeing consultancy services can be particularly useful in burnout prevention as they can help you identify root causes of burnout, shape policies and procedures in response to these findings, and advise about how you can best address areas of weakness.

Get Workplace Mental Health Support With Onebright

At Onebright, we work across the UK to provide mental health support for employers that aims to develop happier, healthier places to work. We are proud to offer a range of evidence-based therapies, mental health training, and wellbeing consultancy services delivered by a dedicated team of accredited professionals to help tackle burnout, stress, and anxiety at work.