Corporate burnout is on the rise, and now it's baked into the system
What kind of system produces a workforce where most people have experienced burnout?
Recent research on people experiencing burnout at work has been eye-opening, to say the least. Several studies have found that the rate of burnout has increased year-on-year and is now the top challenge employees face.
It’s easy to dismiss burnout as someone who is just feeling tired or a bit over it, but that underplays the seriousness of the issue. Proper burnout is chronic stress that doesn’t switch off. It shows up as exhaustion, detachment and a drop in performance -even when someone is trying to keep up.
A recent report by Spring Health found that up to 74% of employees have experienced it, which suggests to me that we’ve moved beyond the remit of the HR department and wellbeing programs, to the point of needing to have a discussion about design and what’s going wrong in the wider system.
Here are a few thoughts that I’d put on the table for consideration.
Disappearing workloads that don’t actually disappear
Let’s start with what’s quickly becoming standard operating practice, particularly in the current economic environment - workforce cuts and restructuring to take costs out of the business.
However, in a lot of cases, the work doesn’t go anywhere after the person doing it has departed the organisation. It gets redistributed across the people who remain.
Organisations rarely say this explicitly. The language is usually efficiency, optimisation, or doing more with less. In practice, it means the same output is expected from a smaller base.
Spring Health’s data points to unmanageable workload as a primary driver of burnout. That isn’t surprising to me, because many workplaces I’ve seen now assume stretch as a baseline, not an exception.
Redundancy used to imply a reduction in scope and roles that were “genuinely surplus to requirements” (yes, you can tell I used to be a senior manager in the government sector!). Now it often signals a redistribution of effort.
If companies that are still posting profits are taking roles out of the workforce and giving their work to AI, then AI should be handling that work - not the people left behind.
The workday no longer ends
Now consider what’s happened to our time and boundaries over the past few years.
Technology has removed most of the natural boundaries around work. For many people, there’s no clear start and finish; no no real separation between being available and being off.
Too many people feel pressure to “stay across what’s happening” and keep things moving. It might feel reasonable at the time, especially if something urgent has come up. Collectively, those moments create a workday that never properly stops.
Technology has effectively put many of us into a constant state of alert, where people feel connected but depleted. Work spills into evenings and weekends because the signals that used to mark the end of the day have disappeared.
Remote and hybrid work amplified this. Flexibility increased, but the trade-off has been weaker boundaries.
The result is both longer hours and fragmented time. Attention is constantly pulled back into work, even when the day is technically over. Without proper recovery, stress accumulates.
Technology raised the baseline
AI and automation are primarily framed as productivity tools. Which they can be, because they make it possible to do more in less time.
However, they also change expectations. If something can be done faster, it is expected to be done faster. If a tool can increase output, output becomes the new baseline.
At the same time, AI introduces uncertainty. People are aware that parts of their role could be automated or redefined. That awareness creates a low level of fear and shapes behaviour.
Many people respond by pushing harder to prove themselves valuable. They might feel the need to be more visible and produce more, or to keep up with the new tools and platforms.
Often you end up with a combination that is difficult to sustain:
higher output expectations
fewer people doing the work
constant connectivity
ongoing pressure to stay relevant.
I read an interesting article in Forbes recently which framed technology as something that keeps the brain in a loop of checking and scanning. AI extends that loop, because it adds performance pressure on top of attention pressure. This is where burnout starts to accelerate.
Employees are absorbing the cost
Put all these pieces together and a pattern starts to emerge:
workload increases without a corresponding increase in capacity
time boundaries disappear
performance expectations rise again.
The system might look more efficient on paper, but it becomes more extractive in practice.
The cost of that extraction doesn’t sit on the balance sheet. It sits with employees. It’s visible in exhaustion, disengagement, sick leave and attrition. It shows up in people who are still doing their jobs, but with less energy and less margin.
All too often, companies treat burnout gets treated as an individual issue to manage. People are told to take some paid time off, or call the employee assistance program. These things have a role in addressing the symptoms, but they don’t address the underlying mechanics.
People aren’t fixing their burnout
Much corporate thinking assumes that burnout can be solved at an individual level with wellness programs and support. What I’m seeing instead is people starting to question whether the model works for them at all. They’re asking whether they want to keep operating in an environment where this level of pressure is normal.
We could be in the early stages of something broader - not a mass exit from the workforce overnight, but a steady reassessment of what work is worth.
Finally, burnout is often framed as a warning sign for individuals, but it’s also a signal for organisations. When most of the workforce has experienced it, the model itself might be broken.