Beating burnout starts at the top of your business

Written and published by Rachael Haynes, 30 August 2024. Updated by British Safety Council, 14 August 2026.

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At a glance

Burnout is a syndrome the World Health Organisation defines as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. It's classified as an occupational phenomenon, not a medical condition, and has three dimensions: exhaustion, increased mental distance or cynicism towards work, and reduced professional efficacy.

British Safety Council's view: prevention starts with leadership — understanding what's driving stress in your specific organisation, then acting on that picture, rather than relying on generic wellbeing perks.

Source: WHO, ICD-11 (2019)

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Some workplace metrics are easy to measure — from levels of profit and loss to rates of sickness and absence — while measuring levels of burnout is an altogether more complex task. It's also increasingly becoming an agenda item in the boardroom.

What is workplace burnout?

Burnout is a syndrome the World Health Organisation (WHO) defines as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. WHO's International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) describes it as an occupational phenomenon rather than a medical condition, and identifies three dimensions: feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion; increased mental distance from one's job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism; and reduced professional efficacy.

Source: WHO — Burn-out an "occupational phenomenon": International Classification of Diseases

Identifying burnout in the workplace isn't always easy. When people feel burned out by their work, you won't necessarily see it – human beings can be adept at masking the signs – particularly if we don't feel psychologically safe enough in our working environments to reach out.

Why can burnout be difficult to spot?

'Pluralistic ignorance' is a term used to describe when we feel something is wrong, or we're not on top of our game, but instead of talking with someone about it, we carry on as normal. And, subsequently, because everyone else is doing the same thing, we may perceive others are OK and the problem is ourselves. But behind these masks, others may be in a similar boat.

What are the signs of burnout?

Burnout is commonly characterised by WHO's three core dimensions (see source above): energy depletion or exhaustion; increased mental distance from your job, or feelings of negativity and cynicism towards it; and reduced professional efficacy. In practice, this can also show up as impaired attention and concentration, apathy or aversion to work (but not laziness), and intense feelings of being overwhelmed.

What causes burnout in the workplace?

Burnout is not limited to high pressure roles. It can impact anyone because the underlying drivers are common factors across today's working environments – high work demands and perceived lack of job control, mismatch between reward and recognition, perceived lack of community, lack of fairness or organisational justice, or a mismatch between individual and corporate values, for example.

Source: this maps closely to Maslach and Leiter's "six areas of worklife" model, and to the Health and Safety Executive's six work-related stress risk factors: demands, control, support, relationships, role and change.

The impact of stress and burnout on leaders and businesses

We know that burnout leads to chronic fatigue, irritability, insomnia and reduced motivation. Physically, it can manifest through headaches and muscle tension, high blood pressure and a loss of appetite. While burnout itself is hard to measure directly, workplace stress — one of its main drivers — is well tracked. Gallup's State of the Global Workplace 2026 report found that leaders experience daily stress at a significantly higher rate than individual contributors (46% versus 39%), even though leaders also report higher engagement and life satisfaction. That gap matters: the finding reinforces the importance of including leaders in organisational approaches to preventing stress and burnout.

Source: Gallup, State of the Global Workplace 2026 report

In the workplace, burnout manifests through reduced innovation and productivity, absenteeism, presenteeism and reduced quality of work – and it represents a significant cost to UK business both in financial and, more importantly, human terms. However, quoting large financial impact numbers means little compared to understanding how stress and burnout actually impacts your own organisation's people, performance and bottom line.

No matter which studies you look at, the evidence for addressing stress and, in turn, burnout, and improving wellbeing is a no brainer. Ultimately, higher wellbeing and engagement drives down turnover, absence and safety incidents - whilst turning up customer loyalty, sales, innovation, production, profitability.

How can employers prevent and reduce workplace burnout?

So how do we get on top of this global occupational phenomenon? Ultimately, what we're talking about is optimising our people experience in the workplace. There is very limited scientific evidence to support the effectiveness of tertiary interventions – such as helplines and health apps – in addressing stress and burnout, largely because we're rarely comparing homogeneous approaches to workplace wellbeing.

However, it is the primary factors, driven from the top down, that make life at my company amazing or awful: does the design of my job - the way work is organised, the quality and safety of my working environment, the culture, the working relationships etc. - enable or inhibit my work experience?

So how can we do this? Fundamentally, we need to understand our people 'enablers' and our people 'inhibitors' so we can create informed, relevant and impactful approaches. Know what data and information to look at – and look at it holistically – and know what to do with it.

Questions to ask about your organisation

• Are your people managers creating stress, or do they help your people thrive in their work?
• Do they simply manage – or do they lead, inspire and coach?
• Are you 'managing' or 'mitigating' stress?
• How well do you understand your exposures to work stress?
• How well do you understand the relationship between work-stress and your employee engagement?
• How well are your managers equipped to identify and address signs of stress in their teams?
• Do your teams have sufficient control over their roles?
• What meaning do your employees find in their work?

Only by having an informed picture of your enablers and inhibitors, can you embed relevant and effective interventions. Otherwise, are you just hoping that your approach is going to work? We've encountered thousands of different approaches in organisations around the world in addressing worker wellbeing, both informed and creative, to the typically less effective 'off-shelf' approaches. But beating burnout fundamentally requires senior leaders and decision-makers to understand the prevalence and drivers of stress in their organisation. After all, the health of the workplace is indicative of the health of the workforce.

What should employers and managers do to address burnout?

Beating burnout requires HR and SHEQ leaders to review policies around flexible working, working time directives, and workplace stress, and providing employees with the opportunity to feed into the design, development, and delivery of workplace wellbeing strategies. It requires budget holders to see the links between burnout, productivity, and profits. Ultimately, burnout reduces productivity and reduced productivity reduces profits.

What can employees do if they're experiencing signs of burnout?

It also requires employees to actively participate in workplace offerings, before burning out becomes burnt out. From sharing in 'time to talk' sessions to offering Employee Assistance Programmes such as counselling services, it all helps to contribute to a culture of clarity, communication, and collaboration; in which colleagues feel comfortable to share their stress, rather than bottle it up.

Key takeaways

Beating burnout requires commitment, clarity, and communication from business leaders and decision-makers. It means putting worker wellbeing front and centre, investing in wellbeing programmes, promoting work-life balance, and encouraging open and stigma-free communication.

Ultimately this begins with leadership: the way you role model best practice and lead your organisation to adopt a better working culture. And it ends with thriving workers: a happier workplace, and hopefully also higher profits. Employees who find meaning in their work - those who connect with the mission, vision and values of the organisation, who are empowered - are more creative, more likely to feel they can raise new ideas or objections and ultimately, more likely to feel in better health, and at lower risk of work-related stress and burnout.

In my mind, that's a no brainer.

How British Safety Council can help

Our experts help organisations adopt best practice approaches to wellbeing at work, and we do this by working with employers to help understand both the known and unknown needs and issues – so the approach our clients take to wellbeing addresses their actual key people ad business risks. We help make 'wellbeing' part of business culture and not just an 'initiative'. Find out more about our Stress Risk Management Consultancy, or explore Manage the Conversation, our training course for line managers supporting employee mental health.