Should we stop offering our wellness program?
You don't need to stop offering your wellness program just because it isn't reducing burnout, but it helps to be clear about what it can and can't do. Counseling access, stress-management resources, and time for exercise or rest can help individual employees, and caring about employees' wellbeing is worthwhile whether or not it changes a retention number.
What a wellness program can't do is change the conditions people work in. A large study of workers in the United Kingdom compared employees who took part in resilience training, mindfulness, wellbeing apps, and similar offerings with employees who didn't, and across several measures of wellbeing the participants appeared no better off (Fleming, 2024). The study looked at one point in time, so it can't establish why. Its author's reading is that these offerings weren't giving workers what they needed to meet the demands of their jobs.
What could be causing burnout in our organization?
Burnout in your organization could be caused by several things, and you probably won't know which until you ask. Gallup's research on burnout names five factors most strongly connected with it: unfair treatment at work, an unmanageable workload, a lack of role clarity, a lack of communication and support from a manager, and unreasonable time pressure (Wigert and Agrawal, 2018).
Relationships matter as much as policies. Employees' experiences with their supervisors and leaders shape whether they feel valued, capable, and supported, and an organization can have good policies on paper and still have teams where people feel unsupported day to day. If leaders say employees matter but workloads, schedules, or decisions don't reflect it, employees may not experience a wellness program as support.
These causes rarely show up evenly across teams. If workload and time are the main problem, Our people say they have no work-life balance. What can we actually change? covers what an employer can do about them.
How do we find out what's driving burnout here?
Finding out what's driving burnout in your organization means combining what employees tell you with the information you already have, and looking at both by department, shift, role, and length of service, so that differences between groups aren't lost in one organization-wide number. A survey, focus groups, or individual conversations can each work, and who does the asking matters, because employees may not tell a supervisor that the supervisor is part of the problem. How do I find out what my employees actually need? covers how to ask so that people answer candidly.
Records you already keep, such as overtime, unused vacation time, absences, and turnover by team, can show where people are stretched before anyone says so. Look for strengths as well as problems. Teams where people are doing well can show you what's worth protecting. If you aren't sure whether what you're seeing is burnout or a busy season, How do I know if my employees are burned out or just busy? covers the difference.
What does reducing burnout ask of leaders?
Reducing burnout asks leaders to listen, question their own assumptions, examine how their decisions and practices affect others, acknowledge when something isn't working, and take responsibility for making improvements. That may mean investing money, changing policies, redistributing workloads, developing supervisors' leadership skills, or changing their own behavior.
It also means recognizing that supervisors need support themselves, since a supervisor carrying an unmanageable load has little room to help a stretched team.
Leaders work under real constraints, and not every cause of burnout has an easy solution. When something can't change, say so and explain why, then work with employees on what would reduce the pressure around it. Once changes are in place, go back to the same employees and the same records to see whether they helped. How do we know whether the change we made actually helped? covers how.
The Grantibly perspective
Angelika's perspective
We're interested in both individual and organizational responsibility. People can develop healthier mindsets, resilience, and ways of working, but that alone isn't enough. Organizations, leaders, and supervisors also have a responsibility to create conditions that support those things, and supervisors and leaders need support themselves if they're going to support their employees sustainably.
It isn't enough to say that employees matter, promote resilience, or offer wellness initiatives. Those values need to be reflected in how people are treated, how decisions are made, how leaders lead, and how the organization operates. The goal isn't to blame leadership or expect perfection. It's to understand what is actually happening, why employees are having the experiences they are, and what changes might improve their wellbeing. Employee wellbeing should be valued in its own right, not simply as a means of improving retention or productivity.
