Burnout is a real deal. But is it addressed the right way? Most organisations talk about burnout as if it’s a personal capacity problem. Employees are encouraged to be more resilient, attend wellness sessions, take short breaks, or learn how to manage stress better. All of this sounds supportive. But does it uncover the root cause of burnout?
Outlook quoted a Microsoft study, which found that in India, 29% of the workers are experiencing increased burnout at work, owing to an increase in the workday span by 1 hour. The Work Trend Index report further revealed that one-third of the Indian respondents attributed this burnout to the lack of separation between work duties and personal obligations. They said that these are impacting their well-being.
This goes beyond framing burnout as a personal limitation or a health concern. When large sections of a country’s workforce consistently attribute their exhaustion to the conditions in which they work, it signals something structural. Fatigue, when experienced collectively, is no longer an individual struggle. It becomes an organisational and systemic issue.
Anjali Raghuvanshi, Chief People Officer, Randstad India & GCC, Senior Director – Business Innovation, said, “In certain situations, wellness initiatives may unintentionally become a surface-level response to deeper organisational issues. While meditation apps, yoga sessions, or mental health days are extremely valuable, they cannot compensate for unrealistic workloads, unclear role expectations, chronic understaffing, or inefficient processes.”
According to her, when structural inefficiencies persist, it is important to make sure that wellness programs do not risk becoming a symbolic gesture rather than a meaningful intervention. True employee wellbeing requires organisations to address root causes, such as poor job design, fragmented decision-making, and constant firefighting, alongside offering wellness tools.
Types of burnout
According to a scholarly paper published in PubMed, there are three major types of burnout, which are:f
- Frenetic: This kind of burnout affects those who are highly involved and ambitious, and overload themselves until exhaustion. They take on more responsibilities than needed, stretch their limits repeatedly, and tie their identity to output until exhaustion becomes inevitable.
Example: A senior consultant who keeps volunteering for critical projects, answers emails past midnight, and consistently exceeds targets but slowly becomes irritable, physically drained, and unable to recover between deadlines, is a classic example of a person affected by this.
- Under-challenged: This occurs when employees feel unstimulated, unrecognised, or stuck in repetitive work that lacks growth or meaning. The exhaustion here is not from overload, but from monotony and the psychological strain of disengagement.
Example: An experienced software developer assigned only maintenance tasks for years, with no innovation or learning opportunities. Work gets done, but enthusiasm fades, initiative drops, and emotional detachment sets in.
- Emotionally worn-out: This develops when employees feel their efforts no longer make a difference, especially in environments where recognition, fairness, or support are absent. Over time, they stop trying to change their circumstances and emotionally withdraw as a coping mechanism.
Example: A mid-level manager who repeatedly raises concerns about unrealistic timelines but sees no change. Eventually, they stop escalating issues, do only what is necessary, and avoid investing emotionally in outcomes.
On this, Anjali Raghuvanshi said, “Emotional withdrawal often appears quietly before any measurable drop in output. Employees may become less vocal in meetings, stop sharing ideas, or disengage from informal conversations. They may still complete tasks, but with reduced enthusiasm or emotional investment. You might also notice increased cynicism, shorter responses, or a “just doing my job” mindset replacing proactive behaviour. This stage is particularly critical because productivity may look stable, masking underlying disengagement.”
She further added that over time, this emotional distance erodes collaboration, creativity, and problem-solving. Leaders who pay attention to shifts in energy, tone, and participation and not just KPIs, can intervene early.
She stated that regular check-ins, psychological safety, and genuine curiosity about employee experience are essential to preventing emotional withdrawal from turning into burnout or attrition. Creating a culture of curiosity is a great way to challenge the status quo, thus pushing the organisation to better both its own and its employees’ prospects.
Primary causes of burnout
On this, Moneycontrol quoted a study by Blind, an anonymous app for professionals. The report stated that 72% of Indian employees attributed their working hours to working for more than the legal 48‑hour week, while 83% said they have experienced burnout.
Further, Blind found that when work begins to feel toxic, quiet disengagement, doing only what is minimally required, emerges as the most common response across generations. Per the report, 39% of GenZ and GenX employees, 33% of millennials, and 29% of baby boomers prefer to withdraw silently rather than directly confront workplace issues.
These findings point to a deeper organisational concern. It demands closer attention from HR leaders and management alike. Neither burnout emerges overnight, nor is it driven by workload alone. Often, it develops gradually when workplace systems begin to normalise pressure without providing corresponding support, clarity, or control.
Extended working hours are only the most visible cause. Beneath them lie other factors such as unclear priorities, constant urgency, and the expectation of uninterrupted availability. Such things slowly erode an employee’s capacity to recover.
“Redesigning work has to start where the work actually happens on the floor, not just in the boardroom. In our organisation, that means leaders stepping in during high‑occupancy or peak days to support teams, not supervise them. When executives share the workload alongside frontline staff, it immediately eases pressure and signals respect for the reality of the job,” said Mugdha Mahambrey, GM- Human Resources at Chalet Hotels.
Hospitality, being a highly human-oriented sector with more physical labour, has higher risks of burnout than many other industries. Sharing an example on these lines, Mugdha Mahambrey said, “I remember a particularly long holiday season where we were delivering some of our best performance metrics, yet many team members hadn’t taken adequate time off. That contrast was a powerful signal for us. It prompted deliberate pauses, rotating people, redistributing workloads, and insisting on recovery time.”
As work becomes increasingly digital and always accessible, the boundaries that once separated professional responsibilities from personal time continue to blur, turning temporary peaks of pressure into a permanent state of strain.
Plus, when employees perceive that increased contribution does not translate into recognition, growth, or meaningful outcomes, motivation begins to decline. And this is exactly where efficient leadership comes into action.
Role of leadership in burnout management
Some of the most common causes of burnout indicate systematic failure more than individual health and energy. It is needless to say that systematic failure happens as the cause of inefficiency in leadership.
The primary task of a leader should be to redesign organisational structure for a healthier workforce, with time to rest.
“Framing burnout as an individual problem risks missing the real issue. As leaders, the responsibility sits with us to fix the system by addressing staffing models, scheduling discipline, and recovery time rather than asking people to simply be more resilient,” said Mugdha Mahambrey.
Two years ago, a video call clip of an abusive HDFC Bank manager went viral. In the clip, he was seen asking for sales updates in unparliamentary language, over a video call, in the presence of female colleagues.
Such instances are not just emotionally tiring for the employees, but also highly disturbing. Recently, Kerala CPI-M leader AA Rahim claimed in the Rajya Sabha that about 500 bank employees have died by suicide in the past decade. He attributed this to the working conditions in various private sector banks. Rahim further pointed towards work-related stress, harassment and workplace abuse as reasons why employees have taken their lives.
It is pertinent to note that when leadership maintains silence even under such circumstances, employees are pushed over the edge. Either people take such drastic steps or work continues, but energy, creativity, and initiative begin to withdraw.
Taken together, these factors suggest that burnout is less a consequence of individual inability to cope and more a reflection of how leadership designs work or acts in such extreme situations.
Ideal leadership action
According to Anjali Raghuvanshi, leaders can also introduce flexible work models, outcome-based performance measures, and better cross-team coordination to reduce friction. Importantly, redesigning work requires involving employees in diagnosing pain points, they know where bottlenecks and inefficiencies exist.
“When leaders focus on removing obstacles instead of boosting morale alone, they create environments where people can perform at their best without burning out. Sustainable performance is achieved through intelligent design, not heroic endurance,” she said.
Addressing organisational indifference requires structural action, not symbolic care. It doesn’t start with wellness calendars or motivation talks. It starts with leaders changing how work is designed, prioritised, and rewarded. When leaders openly acknowledge where work has become unsustainable, with overlapping deadlines, chronic understaffing, and constant escalation, they legitimise the negativity experienced by the employees.
When outcomes are valued without equal attention to the conditions under which those outcomes are achieved, exhaustion becomes an invisible cost of success. Teams may continue delivering results, but sustainability quietly erodes. Instead of asking ‘what’, it is important for the leaders to ask ‘how’ an outcome has been achieved.
One more thing that comes in loop when leadership is discussed is ‘psychological safety’. Employees are more likely to speak about overload when they believe their concerns will lead to adjustment rather than judgment. When feedback just talks about the output and not the real effort that went into achieving it, people tend to feel emotionally burnt out.
An ideal leader is what shapes workplace policies and sets examples. Thus, instead of just encouraging boundaries, leaders need to draw them. Employees take cues from leadership behaviour. When responsiveness at all hours becomes a signal of commitment, boundaries collapse regardless of formal guidelines.
Leaders who demonstrate sustainable work patterns, respect downtime, limit unnecessary urgency, and normalise recovery are the ones who successfully reshape organisational structure.
Burnout in the future of work
As work becomes more flexible, distributed, and digital, exhaustion will no longer look like breakdowns or absence. It will look like constant availability, quiet compliance, and emotional detachment.
Being on the system will remove natural stopping points. Without clear leadership boundaries, work will expand endlessly into personal time. The line between flexibility and expectation will blur, and many employees will internalise pressure rather than resist it.
In the future, organisations should treat employees as a key component of business. Instead of defining ambition and growth targets, management should be able to set limits, create clarity, and protect sustainability.
In the future of work, output may not come from how much organisations can extract from their people, but from how intelligently they deploy them. Because burnout is not simply a well-being issue, it is a signal of how work is designed. And the future will belong to organisations that learn to design work that people can endure, sustain, and meaningfully invest in over time.
