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Employees are reporting burnout in online reviews of their employer more frequently than ever before, research from Glassdoor has revealed.
According to its Employee Confidence Index for July, the share of Glassdoor reviews mentioning burnout in Q3 2024 has reached its highest level since the company began monitoring this data in 2016.
Compared to Q4 2019, the number of reviews mentioning burnout is now 44% higher.
Daniel Zhao, Chief Economist at Glassdoor, suggests employees may be struggling with workloads after years of labor shortages, understaffing, and slow hiring in the past few years.
“During the labor shortages era, burned out workers bore the brunt of being short-staffed,” his report explains. “And now, even as workloads have normalized, many employers have pulled back on hiring, leaving many teams stretched thin.”
Speaking to Inc, Zhao added that employees “haven’t had the time to catch their breath” since 2020. “We’ve just jumped from crisis to crisis.”
Employee burnout is affecting confidence in employers
With employees seemingly more susceptible to burnout, and more vocal in sharing their experience in online forums, their confidence in the ability of their company to deliver a secure, healthy, and equitable workplace is also taking a hit.
According to Glassdoor’s index, employee confidence reached a record low in February. Although there has been a slight jump in the share of employees with a positive 6-month outlook for their business from 47.8% in June to 48.1% in July, the rebound is far from strong.
“It remains on shaky ground as employees remain anxious about their employers’ business prospects,” Zhao added.
Indeed, Glassdoor’s data shows that only 34% of reviews mentioning burnout had a “positive business outlook,” lifting to 54% for those where burnout is not mentioned.
Why are employers seeing high levels of burnout?
Over 80% of employees are at risk of burning out in 2024, Mercer’s Global Talent Trends report has found. Among the biggest contributing factors named by employees are financial strain (43%), exhaustion (40%), and excessive workload (37%).
Business leadership have a crucial role to play in addressing excessive workloads that cause exhaustion, the Glassdoor report said.
“Burnout is not just a function of how much business an employer gets,” Zhao wrote. “Employees also view it as a result of leaders’ decisions on resource allocation, and high burnout reviews report lower business outlook as employees lose faith in leadership decision making.
This, in turn, may be leading to employees growing frustrated with their employer and leaving reviews that describe how working at the company impacted their mental wellbeing.
“If they feel like their leaders are not giving them the resources in order to succeed, then they're going to blame that burnout on their leaders," he explained to Inc.
Zhao’s recommendations to employers looking to address burnout in their workforce focus on proactive steps to reduce workload including effective staffing and resource allocation, addressing the root cause of burnout rather than just responding to its symptoms.
"It could just be that work is very, very busy right now, or it could be because the company has gone through layoffs recently," Zhao said. “Figuring out the reason employees feel burned out is really important, because that helps determine how you address it."
