How to Prevent Burnout at Work in 5 Proven Steps

Employee burnout is a serious problem that affects both your business and your employees personally. Preventing burnout in the workplace is straightforward (relatively speaking, at least), but it requires a shift in thinking and for everyone to be involved.

In this article, we’re going to look at what burnout is, what causes it, why it matters, addressing burnout as a cultural problem, and, most importantly, how to prevent burnout at work.

So let’s get started with what burnout actually is, and what it isn’t.

What is Burnout, Really?

Burnout is an interesting term, as it’s not actually classed as an illness or medical condition. As defined by the World Health Organization (WHO), it’s an “occupational phenomenon” and is technically classified as a syndrome – in other words, it’s a collection of symptoms specifically in relation to the workplace.

Culturally, though, we tend to look beyond ’employee burnout’ and extend the term into other areas of life. The syndrome was originated by psychoanalyst Herbert Freudenberger in the 1970s, likening the feeling to a burned-out building or a candle that’s burned out from overuse – a way we’ve all felt from time to time in relation to various areas of life, like caregiving, parenting, or living with various other pressures, illnesses, and conditions.

The Three Signs of Burnout

The WHO characterises the signs of burnout at work by three specific dimensions:

• Feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion.
• Increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job.
• Reduced professional efficacy.

These three key signs give us a little more insight into the condition, but don’t really give us a clear picture of how to prevent burnout at work. For that, we need to dive a little deeper into the condition and, specifically, we need to define it in relation to stress.

Burnout vs Stress

Stress and burnout share similar symptoms, but are not the same. Stress is something we all experience on a daily basis in response to external pressures and demands. It’s natural, short-term, and can, in small doses, be a helpful tool for problem-solving and motivation.

Burnout, on the other hand, is much more long-term – when you’ve got nothing left to give. If you think of it like a phone battery, stress is when your battery is running low; burnout is when your battery is completely dead. You can manage a low battery and take measures to preserve it before you need to recharge. With burnout, there’s no wiggle room – you’re out of the game.

Aspect	Stress	Burnout
Core feeling	Over-engaged, too much pressure	Disengaged, empty, running on nothing
Emotions	Urgency, anxiety, feeling overwhelmed	Helplessness, detachment, cynicism
Energy	Over-reactive, wired, hard to switch off	Blunted, exhausted, no fuel left
Impact shows up as	Mostly physical, racing mind and body	Mostly emotional and motivational
Sense of the work	Still cares, but struggling to keep up	Stopped caring, feels pointless
Does rest fix it?	Often, at least for a while	Rarely on its own, needs bigger change

Why Preventing Burnout at Work Matters

Preventing burnout in the workplace is essential, otherwise, you end up with employees who have nothing left to give. This can lead to higher rates of absenteeism and presenteeism, and then your business suffers. It’s a vicious cycle that needs to be tackled by prevention, not reaction – if you’re already spotting the signs of employee burnout in your workforce, then the damage is already taking place.

Think of it like a drip from your ceiling – it doesn’t look like much, and you can just stick a bucket underneath it, problem solved, right? But actually, there’s a pool of water under your bath, and it’s rotting the floorboards. If you’re noticing the signs of burnout at work, damage is already being done to your business.

What Actually Causes Burnout at Work

There are a variety of causes of burnout at work, but there are a few key ones we’re going to look at here. These particular causes can often be addressed and controlled directly by the business, preventing burnout in the workplace before it begins.

Workload and Unrealistic Demands

This is an obvious one – if you demand too much of your employees, they’re going to get stressed. They’ll feel like they can’t do their job properly, and they’ll worry about job security. If they’re too stressed for too long (i.e. you don’t ease up on what you’re demanding of them), then they’re much more likely to burn out and begin engaging in presenteeism.

Lack of Control and Autonomy

We’ve all known a micromanager at some point or another. You show up to work and feel like a puppet, with no room to tackle challenges in your own way. While this sounds like a great way for a manager to get exactly what they want out of their employees, humans crave autonomy – they want to feel like they’ve made decisions that matter and have achieved something. Restricting the way someone achieves a goal quashes that sense of achievement. But if the end result is the same, why does it matter?

Additionally, employees with neurodiverse conditions may actually need this level of control and autonomy, and if you’re preventing that from happening, your business could be risking legal consequences, too.

Poor Management and Weak Support

Lack of control and autonomy at work is often down to poor management – someone who wants to control, rather than manage. But it’s a two-way street, as not all of your employees will just sit there and quietly burn out. Even though preventing burnout in the workplace is paramount, your managers still need to be able to spot the signs of burnout at work, for when prevention hasn’t quite worked.

If they can’t spot the signs and they aren’t proactive enough in preventing burnout in the workplace, your employees will suffer. Some colleagues will actively ask for support, but if there’s none there, then how does the problem get fixed? Your managers are your first line of support in the workplace, and making sure they’re trained to support employees is a crucial part of preventing burnout in the workplace.

Unfairness, Unclear Roles and Values Mismatch

Similarly, roles that don’t quite align with employee expectations can often lead to burnout, too. And usually, this is down to poor management.

Imagine a team where someone leaves, so a colleague is asked to jump in and pick up their workload while a replacement is hired. Except that the replacement is never actually hired, so your employee just ends up picking up someone else’s work permanently – no change in role or splitting up the work; it just happens and becomes the status quo.

This employee would be primed for burnout. They’ll be feeling the stress of the extra workload that they didn’t sign up for originally, and the unfairness that the work isn’t divided up amongst colleagues. You’d just have to hope that they speak up before it becomes too serious.

A values mismatch can also lead to a similar situation. Imagine you have a policy of not answering emails outside working hours, but then some employees begin answering emails over evenings and weekends. Then it slowly becomes the expectation. The problem is that no one signed up for that. Some employees will be happy to do it, whereas others won’t, and it can lead to burnout in both directions: one group of employees who end up working weekends because they want to follow the culture and end up stressed, and another group who only want to work their actual contracted hours, but then begin to worry that they may be seen as not doing enough.

Ultimately, it comes down to poor management again.

Below, we’ve put together a table based on the six areas of work model developed by Leiter and Maslach. We’ve compared what it looks like when that area isn’t properly fulfilled for your employees (which can be what causes burnout at work), and what helps resolve it.

Driver	What It Looks Like When It’s Missing	What Helps
Workload	Consistently more to do than time to do it, no let-up between peaks, or a lack of work leading to boredom	Match demands to capacity, resource properly, protect recovery time between busy periods
Control	Little say over how, when or where work gets done; micromanagement	Give autonomy where you can, involve people in decisions that affect them
Reward	Effort goes unnoticed; pay, recognition or progression don’t reflect the work	Recognise good work genuinely and regularly, make sure reward feels fair
Community	Isolation, weak team bonds, unresolved conflict, poor support	Build connection, deal with conflict early, make support easy to reach
Fairness	Inconsistent decisions, favouritism, unclear or unequal treatment	Apply rules consistently, be transparent about decisions, act on unfairness quickly
Values	A gap between what the organisation says and what it does or asks of people	Align expectations with stated values, close the say-do gap

How to Prevent Burnout at Work

Preventing burnout in the workplace is actually a lot more straightforward than it might initially seem – at least on paper, anyway. Most of it comes down to good management and a culture that values the time and input of your employees.

Fix the Workload, Not Just the Worker

Workload is one of the primary causes of burnout at work. You might think it’s a case of an employee having too much work, but it’s actually a little more nuanced than that:

• Too much work: employees will experience high levels of stress for an extended period of time, leading to burnout.
• Too little work: employees become bored and demotivated. They may worry about job security if there’s not enough work.
• Work mismatch: employees who are expected to do work that they weren’t originally hired for may struggle and become stressed.

Ultimately, you need to ensure that the work you’re asking your employees to do is the right fit for them. No one’s saying that employees are allowed to shirk their responsibilities – that’s a performance management issue – but if you’re providing them with the wrong type or level of work, your employees will start to experience burnout.

Before going straight to performance management, start by asking them about their workload to begin an open and honest conversation. Give them a safe space to speak freely (more on that later), and you might find that your colleagues have plenty of useful information to offer.

Give People Control Where You Can

Different workplaces have different management styles – that’s a given. And while we’re not saying you have to switch to a laissez-faire leadership style immediately, it’s worth taking a look at how the managers in your workplace actually manage their team members.

As we said earlier, no one wants to be a puppet. When people have no control over what they do and how they work, they feel like drones and will, for the most part, check out. Giving your employees control over how they work and the decisions they make can have a huge impact on their levels of pride and self-esteem, and is key to preventing burnout in the workplace.

Train and Support Your Managers

If you want to know how to prevent burnout at work, whilst you do need to look at the employees directly, you also need to take a step back and look at how they’re supported. As we said earlier, burnout often comes down to management issues.

Your managers aren’t just there to tell people what to do – they have a responsibility to support the person as a whole, too. We covered this topic in our recent free webinar titled Why Managers Struggle with Mental Health Conversations. Managers aren’t responsible for feeding employees’ cats, but they do need to look after their team at work – and that includes preventing employee burnout.

Train your managers to have mental health conversations. Not only will it make them more empathetic as a leader, but it will also help them foster an environment for open communication. Speaking of which…

Make it Safe to Speak Up Early

From an employee perspective, preventing burnout in the workplace means feeling like they have the ability to speak up safely. If an employee in your business was feeling like their workload was too much, would they be able to approach their manager to discuss it and explore the reasons why? Or would they be told to get on with it and performance managed?

This again comes back to viewing the employee as a whole person, not just the worker who only exists between 09:00 and 17:00. If they can approach their manager and have an open and honest discussion about what’s going on, a temporary period of stress could be prevented from becoming an extended period of burnout through some simple adjustments.

While this does make the case (again) for training your managers around supporting employee mental health, there’s also an element of workplace culture that needs addressing here, but we’ll come back to that later.

Watch the Data, Not Just the Mood

Burnout tends to be a gradual process rather than something that happens overnight. Whilst having open and frank conversations with team members is useful, data can also play a big part in catching the patterns of burnout before they begin to snowball. Some of the key metrics that might indicate a gradual creep towards burnout include:

• Short, frequent absences, or a rise in overall sick days.
• Staff turnover.
• Overtime and working hours (sustained long hours are a leading indicator of burnout).
• Annual leave not being taken.
• Employee wellbeing survey scores dropping from year to year.
• Drops in output or quality – both from individuals and across teams.

The important part here is that metrics need to be tracked over time, not just in isolation. You might have a particularly busy month with lots of overtime, but that shouldn’t send alarm bells ringing. If it’s every month, though, then there’s something fundamentally wrong.

Whilst it’s a little more cold and clinical than the other points on this list, tracking data remains one of the more reliable burnout prevention strategies.

Spotting the Early Warning Signs

When looking for the early signs of burnout at work, team managers need to be the ones keeping an eye out. Most importantly, they’re looking for a change from the norm. They know their team members best, which is why it shouldn’t really fall to HR. Instead, HR should support managers in spotting the signs of burnout and give them pathways to refer an employee who might need help (which is what we’ll look at next).

Signs of employee burnout your managers can look out for include:

• Behavioural shifts, like withdrawing from the team, going quiet in meetings, or being unusually irritable or cynical.
• Performance shifts, like missing deadlines, making more errors than usual, or taking longer to get work done.
• Physical signs, like being visibly tired, taking frequent short absences, or seeming particularly drained and low-energy.

We all have bad days though, so your managers need to be looking out for patterns of this behaviour, not just one-offs.

What to Do if Someone is Already Burning Out

If an employee is experiencing burnout, whether it’s something you’ve noticed or if they’ve approached you, it’s important to take action either way – you can’t just hope it will resolve on its own.

Offer the employee a private, supportive conversation. If you’ve approached them, share your concerns with them. If they’ve approached you, assure them that you’ll listen non-judgmentally.

• Keep your conversation short and non-clinical – you’re not offering medical advice.
• Let the employee lead; don’t force them to share what they aren’t comfortable with talking about.
• Focus on practical relief by looking at what you can take off their plate now, what can wait, and what support they might need.
• Signpost to actual support, don’t try to fix it all yourself: EAP, occupational health, employee counselling service, GP, etc.

Then it’s important to look at the structures that are in place that could have led to burnout developing, and how to prevent burnout at work happening again:

• Address what’s caused the burnout – you can’t send the same person back into the same environment.
• Create an appropriate return to work, with a phased return, adjusted workplace, and regular check-ins.
• Ensure confidentiality and no-blame, so everyone feels safe raising personal concerns moving forward.

Building a Culture That Prevents Burnout

In short, one-off fixes help the individuals who are experiencing burnout, but a shift in culture stops the next person from burning out in the first place. There are lots of ways to shift your workplace culture to focus around burnout prevention strategies, and not all of them will be right for your business. That being said, it’s worth taking notice, because a shift in culture isn’t just something you can will into existence – it has to be planned and actively implemented.

• Make sure your leaders model behaviours: ensure that your workplace leaders take breaks and holidays, and don’t glorify overwork. If they overwork themselves, their teams will feel it’s expected to do the same.
• Workload conversations: Make conversations about workload regular and routine. They’ll become normalised and not just a reactive measure.
• Reward outcomes, not time spent: Focus on the outcomes that you need from your teams, not just a case of more hours means better work.
• Equip managers properly: You can’t just tell your managers to do it – they need to know how to prevent burnout at work. You need to give them the right skills and knowledge to uphold a positive culture that directly tackles employee burnout by having conversations and actively checking-in with their teams.

As studies and reports show time and again (and we always harp on about, too), prevention is better than cure. Think about the time spent dealing with the fallout of a burned-out employee, signposting them to the help they need, covering any time off they might have, and managing the return to work process. In most instances, some well-timed conversations, led by a shift in culture, can highlight a problem before it spirals into full employee burnout.

If you’d like to explore more employee burnout prevention strategies, we’re happy to have a chat with you. Fill out the form below and a member of our team will get back to you.

Frequently Asked Questions about How to Prevent Burnout at Work