How to Reduce Burnout on Your Team

Stress at work has become so common that it is easy to treat it as normal. Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2026 found that 40% of employees worldwide felt a lot of stress the previous day, and in the United States and Canada it was 50%, the highest of any region. The American Psychological Association’s 2026 Work in America survey found 48% of U.S. workers typically feel tense or stressed during the workday, and 37% say their work environment harms their mental health, up from 32% a year earlier.

Some stress is part of meaningful work. Burnout is different. It is what happens when stress becomes constant, when effort stops being recognized and when people feel they have no control over the load. And in my experience, the people most likely to burn out are the ones who care most. I wrote about that in The People Most Likely To Burn Out Are The Ones Who Care Most.

Is burnout a personal problem or a workplace problem?

Mostly a workplace problem. Wellness programs and resilience training can help individuals, but they cannot fix an impossible workload, unclear priorities or a culture where nobody ever says thank you. When leaders treat burnout as something employees need to fix on their own, they miss the parts they actually control.

The cost of ignoring it is real. Gallup’s earlier burnout research found that employees who are frequently burned out are 2.6 times as likely to be actively seeking a new job and 63% more likely to take a sick day. Burnout does not stay private. It shows up in turnover, absences and mistakes.

Protect people’s focus

One of the quiet drivers of burnout is constant interruption. Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index found that employees are interrupted every two minutes during core work hours by meetings, emails or chats, and 80% of workers say they lack enough time or energy to do their work. People are not just working hard. They are working in pieces.

Leaders can change that. Cancel meetings that do not need to happen. Set quiet hours when nobody expects a reply. Stop sending messages late at night that make people feel they must answer. Small changes in how a team communicates can give people back hours of real focus every week.

Watch the people who care most

The employees most at risk are often your best: the nurse who always picks up the extra shift, the manager who answers every message, the salesperson who never says no. They rarely complain, so their exhaustion can be invisible until it suddenly is not. Check in with them deliberately. Ask what they could stop doing. Sometimes the most caring thing a leader can do is say, “You do not have to take this one.”

Build a culture that holds people up

Burnout is lower on teams where people feel supported and connected. The APA found that workers high in what researchers call psychological capital, hope, confidence, resilience and optimism, were far less stressed during the workday: 38% compared with 55% of those low in it (APA, 2026). Leaders help build that by giving people a sense of progress, recognizing their growth and reminding them why the work matters.

This connects directly to the SPARK drivers in my culture keynote, You Are Capable of a Better Culture: Support, Purpose, Appreciation, Relationships, and Knowledge & Growth. When those are strong, people can carry hard seasons without breaking. For leading through especially difficult stretches, see How to Lead a Team Through a Crisis.