Imagine your top performer starts delaying deadlines, takes more unplanned leaves and makes mistakes they never made before.
What do you think, what could be the reason? Are they procrastinating, are they becoming disinterested or are they just taking things for granted?
Chances are, they are facing burnout!
High performers often have lower resilience than expected. One study found average performance scores of 31, while resilience averaged just 19. This imbalance puts them in the “burnout zone,” and employees in this zone are 5× more likely to be looking for a new job.
Burnout is no longer a rare workplace challenge; it’s a silent productivity killer creeping into organizations across industries. The danger? It doesn’t always announce itself loudly. Instead, it shows up in subtle signals like frequent absences, erratic email responses, declining task completion rates, or an unusual spike in errors.
What is workplace burnout?
Workplace burnout is a state where employees are exhausted both mentally and physically at workplace. This may be due to understaffing (leading to higher responsibilities per employee), unskilled employees, overwork to meet deadlines frequently and unrealistic goals.
High performers often burn out. They may be constantly throttling at their highest capacities. Truth is, even the best performers need breaks to recharge and rejuvenate. They are characterized by mental, emotional and physical weariness due to constant overburdening. As stress mounts, your employees lose the enthusiasm and motivation that once propelled them to higher performance.
The engagement paradox
Your highest performers are also your highest drained ones.
A study by Yale and other institutions uncovered that 1 in 5 employees who are highly engaged are at high risk of burnout. These individuals, driven and passionate, are vulnerable due to their intense emotional investment leading to stress and frustration. However, the more burnout, the more employees try to compensate as a coping mechanism.
As a leader, you need to assess your workplace burnout beyond the performance statistics. This is the paradox. It may seem your top-performing employees are thriving but they are also getting burnt out.
What employee burnout looks like?
Here are the early signs of employee burnout:
- They stop caring: Their engagement starts declining. They are late to respond, and seem to care less.
- They’re always tired: They look exhausted, even on Monday morning and always seem absent-minded.
- They isolate themselves: They avoid talking, stop joining team activities, and quietly withdraw.
- Their work slips: Deadlines start slipping, and mistakes happen more often.
How to prevent burnout early?
Preventing burnout is not a one-time activity. It’s an ongoing process. To prevent burnout, opt for:
- Regular Check-Ins
Employee check-ins are regular one-on-one meetings between the manager and employees to discuss overall performance and well-being of employees. Unlike formal performance reviews that are held annually for appraisals, regular check-ins are more frequent to identify burnout patterns and help employees combat it with empathy.
- Watch for Behavior Changes
Identify behavioral changes like:
- Isolation: Instead of engaging with peers like earlier the employee starts isolating themselves.
- Lack of emotional engagement: Employees seem detached. They demonstrate a decline in interest in environment and build boundaries.
- Mood disorders: They show irritability, anxiety, aggressiveness, depression, impatience, etc.
- Loss of self-confidence: They start asking basic questions and look for constant validation.
- Lack of motivation: Employees work for bare minimum of job duties, quietly quitting.
- Set Clear, Realistic Goals
Here are some SMART goals you can set for your team to prevent burnout:
- Specific: Provide employees with at least one wellness activity (yoga, mindfulness, or fitness) every week.
- Measurable: Reduce reported burnout levels in the quarterly employee survey in next 6 months.
- Achievable: Implement a “no-meeting Friday afternoon” policy across all teams.
- Relevant: Ensure managers conduct monthly one-on-one check-ins focused on workload and well-being.
- Time-bound: Launch an employee assistance program (EAP) and achieve spiked participation in 90 days.
- Encourage Real Breaks
Propel your employees to take a well-deserved break and go on vacation frequently. While at work, they can take breaks in between. You can start a “break-room” where they can relax and unwind.
Also ensure, if they are working from home, create a boundary between their work and personal life. Make it a point that your employees are taking ample rest and not working excessively.
- Build Trust and Openness
Create a transparent, people-first culture where open communication, genuine support, and clear expectations are the norm.
Adhere to the 4Cs of trust -
- Commitment: Offer empathetic commitment to your employees
- Caring: Make the employees feel cared for
- Consistency: Create a consistent pattern in how you respond to your employees’ concerns
- Competence: Boost your employees in an empathetic way to meet goals
How does we360.ai measure workforce analytics metrics to measure to identify burnout?
- Constantly high overtime logged
When employees work at the stretch for beyond work hours, this is a sign they are going to meet their threshold soon.
A Canadian study involving ~4,000 workers found that individuals doing 6+ hours of unpaid overtime per week faced significantly higher stress and burnout:
- Men: +84% burnout risk
- Women: +52% burnout risk
Check the pattern with we360.ai attendance module.
- Drop in task completion rate
With we360.ai, you can assess the employees whose task completion rate has declined.
Burned-out employees are 63% more likely to take a sick day and 2.6× more likely to seek another job, both of which reduce task completion
- Increased idle vs active time
These employees' active time becomes less and with the intuitive dashboard, you can view if their idle time is increasing. This is a red flag notifying of employees nearing burnout.
- Frequent sick leaves
Their interest in work declines and they take sick leaves far too often.
Look for employees taking:
- Multiple short sick leaves (e.g., 2–3 days off scattered each month).
- Frequent Mondays/Fridays off (sign of disengagement or recovery fatigue).
- Repeated half-days or last-minute paid time off (PTO indicates stress avoidance).
- Turnover indicators
Look, if your employees are opting for high unplanned leaves or frequent absences. If they are arriving late and leaving early. Is there a drop in quality of work delivered, or fewer contributions to innovative ideas?
Are they showing a lack of interest in promotions or internal mobility? Do they depict stagnant skill development or refuse new projects? Do they show increased LinkedIn profile updates / external networking activity?
- Erratic response to emails
Burned-out employees struggle to prioritize and may miss or delay replies. They withdraw from communication when they feel detached from work. Some may avoid opening or replying to messages that trigger anxiety.
Peek into these patterns via dashboard.
- More mistakes
Their work quality declines and there is an increased frequency of mistakes.
Burned-out employees are 63% more likely to take sick days and report 13% lower confidence in work quality, often due to a higher error rate. They are 2.6 times as likely to be actively seeking a different job.
Make the move before your employee quits
Employee burnout is a fatal problem these days. A little while back, employees were resilient with high commitment; nowadays, they are paying more attention to their mental and physical health. Toxic work culture, underappreciation and overload do not cut in these times anymore.
Your fresh employees are mostly Gen Z and millennials who are more cognizant and picky. They make quicker decisions and smarter choices. So pay attention to your workforce, are they burning out?
With we360.ai, you can gauge their activities and hold one-on-one meetings in alarming employee work patterns. If they show signs of burnout, address this quickly. With a robust workforce analytics tool, you can measure these metrics seamlessly.
Don’t trust us?
Book a demo with we360.ai and see how we will walk you through your workforce concerns and become their favorite employer.
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