Burnout Prevention: What Leaders Can Do Before Employees Reach the Breaking Point
The Better Workplace | By Dr. Paul L. Gerhardt, Professor of Management
A dependable employee takes on one more assignment. Then another. The deadlines keep coming, and the person who rarely complains keeps finding a way to finish.
From a manager’s perspective, the work appears to be getting done. What may be less visible is the cost: missed breaks, evenings spent catching up, and a workload that no longer fits into the available time.
I encourage leaders to ask a practical question before reaching that point: What can we stop, delay, or redistribute this week? Employee burnout prevention requires decisions about how work gets done, along with genuine concern for the people doing it.
What burnout means for workplace leadership
The World Health Organization describes burnout as an occupational phenomenon associated with chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. Its description includes exhaustion, greater mental distance or cynicism toward work, and reduced professional efficacy. WHO does not classify burnout as a medical condition.
This does not make managers responsible for diagnosing employees. It does give leaders a reason to examine work demands, resources, and expectations before problems become entrenched. A missed deadline or quiet meeting is not proof of burnout. It can be a reason to check in respectfully.
1. Make the workload manageable
Start with the work itself. WHO identifies excessive workloads, understaffing, unclear roles, and limited control over work as risks to mental health. Its guidance recommends addressing working conditions and involving employees in identifying improvements.
Review the team’s commitments together. Which tasks are essential now? Which deadlines have real consequences, and which are habits? What recurring report, meeting, or approval adds less value than the time it consumes?
Consider a hypothetical example: a manager assigns an urgent customer project to someone who already has three deadlines that week. A useful response is to choose what moves, clarify the new priorities, and arrange support. Saying that everything remains urgent leaves the employee to resolve an impossible tradeoff alone.
Redistribution also needs a capacity check. Giving excess work to another overloaded employee moves the pressure rather than resolving it. When demand exceeds the whole team’s capacity, leaders may need to reduce scope, seek additional resources, or escalate the problem.
2. Ask specific questions and act on the answers
A general “How are you?” can be difficult to answer honestly when someone is unsure how their response will be received. Make the conversation about the work and leave room for a candid answer.
Try asking: “Which part of your workload feels hardest to sustain?” “What is taking longer than we planned?” or “What would make the biggest difference this week?”
Listen without rushing to defend the deadline or explain why everyone is busy. Employees do not need to disclose personal or medical details for a manager to discuss workload, resources, and support.
Then agree on a concrete next step. For example: “We will move the internal report to next week, and I will confirm that change with the other department today.” Set a follow-up date to find out whether the adjustment helped. When a change is outside your authority, explain what you will raise with the person who can decide.
3. Protect recovery through everyday practices
The U.S. Surgeon General’s Framework for Workplace Mental Health and Well-Being emphasizes adequate rest and respect for boundaries between work and non-work time. Leaders can put those principles into practice through scheduling, coverage, and clear communication.
Make breaks feasible. Arrange coverage before someone takes leave. Explain response expectations for messages outside normal hours, including what truly counts as an emergency. Where continuous service is necessary, establish a clear rotation so availability does not fall on everyone all the time.
Look at your own signals, too. If you send evening emails, clarify when a response is expected or use scheduled delivery. If you encourage time off, avoid praising constant availability in ways that contradict that encouragement.
Time away can provide room to recover. It also matters what employees return to. Review the accumulated work and priorities rather than expecting someone to absorb an unchanged backlog immediately.
4. Notice when reliability becomes an unlimited expectation
Dependable people can become the default answer to every staffing gap. Before asking the same person to help again, review the pattern. Who handles urgent requests, trains new employees, covers absences, and carries the less visible coordination work?
Recognition should be specific and sincere. Pair it with realistic decisions about capacity. “Thank you for covering that absence” means more when the next conversation includes what will be adjusted to make room for the extra work.
A practical workload review for this week
Use your next team meeting or individual check-in to review four things: current commitments, available capacity, obstacles, and opportunities for recovery.
Choose one task to stop or simplify, one deadline to reconsider, and one obstacle you can help remove. Identify who will communicate each decision and when you will check the result. Keep these changes small enough to carry out and meaningful enough for employees to notice.
If an employee raises a health concern, respond respectfully and help them access appropriate workplace or professional support. Keep the conversation within your role. Changes to working conditions can complement support services, but they do not replace individual care when it is needed.
Building a better workplace includes making difficult choices about what can reasonably be accomplished. Begin with the question in today’s image: What can we stop, delay, or redistribute this week? Then follow through.
Continue the conversation
What is one change a leader made that helped you manage your workload? Consider the practice you would want another manager to adopt, without identifying colleagues or sharing private workplace information.
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About Dr. Paul Gerhardt
Dr. Paul L. Gerhardt is a tenured professor of management and Applied Business Program Chair at Pierce College, and a doctoral dissertation chair and graduate faculty member at City University of Seattle. He brings more than 20 years in higher education and two decades of management consulting experience to practical, research-informed conversations about leadership and the workplace.
Sources and further reading
The practical questions and examples in this article are leadership applications of the guidance below. They are not a diagnostic checklist or a guarantee of preventing burnout.
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