HR leaders must address the latest manager burnout crisis before it’s too late

Addressing employee stress has been a major focus area for HR in recent years, as the lingering after-effects of the pandemic, coupled with increasing numbers of layoffs and budget cuts, have led to record levels of burnout. 

But there’s one crucial segment of your workforce that merits special attention— because of both their unique needs and the ripple effect their burnout can have across the entire organization: managers.

According to Gallup, managers are being squeezed from every direction; over the last twelve months managers reported that employees have been asked to take on additional responsibilities (64%) while teams were being restructured (51%) during a period of budget cuts (42%). It’s little wonder then that 55 percent of managers are actively seeking a new job, up from 48% just two years ago. 

This especially matters now as organizations must optimize for efficiency, innovation, and growth in an uncertain economic climate and need to retain their highest performers. 

[ Build a strategy that effectively retains managers and all of your top performers with our career mobility workbook. ]

If managers leave or if burnout affects their ability to do their job, the impact on the entire organization can be huge. Employees reporting to effective managers are 15x more likely to be high performers and 3x more likely to stay with their employer, according to Gartner, which points out that leader and manager effectiveness was cited as a #1 priority for HR leaders in 2023.  

“There’s a real ripple effect. Managers who are the most burnt out tend to have direct reports who are the most burnt out.”

Laura Lomelí,  Ph.D., principal executive advisory consultant for BetterUp.

Here are four strategies for HR leaders to prevent manager burnout from affecting the entire organization.

Identify the early warning signs

There's still a lot of employee burnout from the residual effects of the pandemic, notes Mahima Chawla, CEO and co-founder of Cocoon, makers of leave management software.

And the first step to address any type of burnout, says Chawla, is to understand root causes. Diagnosing and addressing early warning signs of burnout can prevent it from becoming a bigger problem later. 

“As teams have gotten leaner, managers have been asked to both support their teams and play an individual contributor role. People are being spread very thin.”

Mahima Chawla, CEO and co-founder of Cocoon.

To diagnose root causes, Cocoon relies on the CAMPS framework. Every month the company's HR team sends out surveys asking employees to rate their levels of Certainty, Autonomy, Meaning, Progress, and Social inclusion on a scale of one to ten. 

"This allows me to take the pulse on how my managers are doing, and they can use it to measure the engagement of their direct reports," Chawla says. "Understanding the root causes of burnout helps us build solutions to address those issues, which will vary from one person to the next."

Using similar frameworks across the organization can help identify indicators of possible burnout across teams, allowing HR professionals to identify at-risk individuals and offer strategies for resetting job expectations, simplifying processes, and rewiring habits.

Personalize the solutions

Every manager has different stressors, both at work and at home. That makes it especially challenging for HR leaders to implement systematic approaches to alleviating burnout.

The best forms of stress relief will vary by individual, says Amy Spurling, CEO and founder of Compt. Her company helps organizations offer highly personalized benefits such as stipends for yoga classes, childcare, cell phones, individualized coaching, and thousands of other perks. 

"Everyone is at a unique life stage, and their benefits should support that," says Spurling, who also serves as de facto head of HR for the early stage  startup. "And by supporting managers in areas they're passionate about (like personal and professional development), we help mitigate the effects of burnout." 

Providing professional development benefits — like the opportunity to upskill, earn certifications, and degrees — is one way that HR leaders can increase manager satisfaction and retention. In 2022, more than half (58%) of employees said that they are likely to leave their company without professional development or learning opportunities.

[ Measure how your talent development offerings stack up against other companies with interactive quiz. ]

Proactively model a culture of work/life balance

Often, managers are overwhelmed because they’re being asked to do too much. But they don’t always speak up because they want to be seen as a high performer. 

The idea that truly motivated employees need to go the extra mile to ensure their companies' success contributes to burnout, notes Kaley Warner Klemp, executive coach at Guild and co-author of The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership. 

"In corporate America, there's a lot of celebration of the hero: 'So-and-so stayed at their desk all night and made this great thing happen'," she says. "We get into the habit of storytelling around corporate heroes, and people start to think that's what they need to do to be successful."  

Here, executive leadership also needs to play a role. Modeling healthy life/work boundaries starts at the top, says Lomelí.  

Some business leaders may give lip service to 'work-life balance' yet still expect you to answer their emails at 11:30 pm, says Lomelí. This behavior trickles down to managers at every level, and then on to direct reports. But leadership can set clear norms about healthy communication, and back it up by doing simple things like scheduling messages to only go out during normal working hours. 

"They can also say, 'Hey this is not urgent, I'm just thinking out loud right now,'" she adds. "Being very intentional about how you deliver messages can eliminate a lot of unneeded pressure on yourself and your teams."

Clarify expectations—and rescope as necessary

There has been a lot of discussion around how much time managers should spend on people management versus execution or even strategy. When managers assume a “player-coach” role, scope creep is often the result. A 2022 survey by Gartner found that managers now take on 51 percent more responsibilities than they can effectively handle.  

HR leaders can address some of this by redistributing responsibilities, redefining job titles, or providing extra support – ideally in a way that’s scalable to other managers throughout the organization. But some of the responsibility for resetting expectations and rewiring habits starts with the managers themselves, notes Klemp.

In any conversation between a manager and a direct report, each person is 100 percent responsible for ensuring a positive outcome, says Klemp. But many managers tend to assume 150 percent of the responsibility. While the manager's intentions may be good, taking on too much responsibility disempowers employees and leaves managers depleted, she adds.

Surveys by McKinsey & Associates show that middle managers spend nearly half their time on non-managerial tasks, including 31 percent on performing work intended for individual contributors.

"They're trying their hardest to help, but they're not teaching, they're not empowering or coaching, they're not helping that person become their best," Klemp says.

Managers continue to provide a model for the entire organization, explains Lomelí. “By coaching managers to practice self compassion, you also improve the well being of their teams. That's far more effective than trying to solve the problem after they're already too far gone."

About Dan Tynan

Dan is an award-winning journalist who has been writing about technology since long before we all started carrying a computer in our pockets. Along the way he's been an investigative reporter, feature writer, copy editor, columnist, executive editor, and editor-in-chief for several national publications.