Burnout is on the rise

In a year of rising employee anxiety and increasing pressure to drive efficiency, employees are feeling more and more burned out. As businesses trim budgets and headcounts, employees and managers alike are being asked to do more with less. That’s a recipe for burnout as workers are stretched increasingly thin without an end in sight. Managing burnout is crucial for employers to maintain the health of the workforce and to set themselves apart from their competitors.

What do Glassdoor reviews and ratings say?

Nowhere is this more clear than in Glassdoor reviews, where we see the share of reviews mentioning burnout has increased 32% year-over-year as of Q1 2025, bringing it to its highest level since this data began in 2016 and 50% higher than Q4 2019 before the COVID-19 pandemic began.

And Glassdoor data shows that workers suffering from burnout are significantly less satisfied with their employers. The average Glassdoor review that mentions “burnout” rates their employer just 2.68 on average, on a 1-to-5 scale. That’s 26% worse than reviews that don’t mention burnout, which average 3.61.

Table: Glassdoor ratings for reviews that do/don’t mention burnout

When looking at the main workplace factors (out of 5 stars), work-life balance is the one that suffers the most for burned-out employees, with satisfaction ratings a full 34% lower compared to ratings for those that don’t mention burnout.

However, burnout also bleeds into how employees perceive other parts of their workplace experience. The second largest drop is for senior management, where ratings are 29% lower for reviews that mention burnout. Employees often put the blame for burnout on senior management, seeing it as a function of poor planning, prioritization and resourcing decisions.

The next largest drop is for culture & values, where ratings fall 25%. Burnout is often highlighted as a problem perpetuated by the employer’s culture, rather than a result of normal cycles of busy and slow periods. This can be at the company level, where companies are sometimes highlighted as having a “churn and burn” culture, or at the manager level, where individual managers can exacerbate burnout through creating a culture of pressure and overwork.

Burnout is a slow-burn crisis

By its nature, burnout tends to be a slow-burn problem that builds up over time as requests pile up. But burnout can also contaminate the rest of an employee’s experience as workers might start to become jaded. This can also extend to employees who are otherwise happy with their workplace experience.

For example, an employee who rates their overall employee experience as 5 stars, but still mentions burnout, is 2.5 times more likely to report not being satisfied with their work-life balance (i.e., 20% of these reviewers rate their work-life balance 1 to 3 stars) compared to someone who does not mention burnout (8%).

The issue to watch out for is that burnout is ultimately characterized by its unsustainability. In fact, reviews that mention burnout are 26 times more likely to mention “unsustainable” or “unsustainability” than reviews that don’t mention burnout.

Even if a satisfied employee or high performer can sustain a higher workload with no impact to productivity or satisfaction for a short-term sprint, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll be able to do so indefinitely. 

Burnout creates a unique turnover challenge

Why does this matter? Burnout is a problem that appears gradually, and then all at once. Ultimately, unsustainability will result in turnover once burned-out employees reach their breaking points.

On Glassdoor, we can link review sentiment directly to job search behavior, and we see a fairly immediate link between burnout and turnover intentions. Reviewers that mention burnout are 59% more likely to apply for a new job on Glassdoor soon after leaving their review.

Crucially, the largest increases in turnover are actually by people who are otherwise satisfied with their job. Employees who rate their employer 5 stars out of 5 are the least likely to apply to new jobs, but if they mention burnout in their reviews, their turnover intentions increase by 58%. Similarly, for an employee who rates their employer 4 stars, their turnover intentions rise 66%.

Put another way: employees who rate their employers as 5 stars and mention burnout are as likely to turnover as employees who don’t mention burnout but who rate their employers as 3 stars.

Intuitively, employees who are already dissatisfied with their experience are going to be searching for jobs regardless of whether they are burned out or not. It’s the employees who are otherwise satisfied that are the most concerning flight risks, as these are often high performers or regrettable turnover.

What do employees say about burnout and how to address it?

Reviews that mention burnout are more likely to mention words like “unsustainable” than reviews that don’t. Some other themes that show up uniquely in reviews that mention burnout are terms that describe a “high-pressure”, “sink or swim” environment. Similarly, respecting “boundaries”, limiting “after-hours” work and planning ahead to avoid “last-minute” requests are important.

Lack of recognition also comes up as a theme, with burned-out employees feeling “undervalued” or lacking “recognition” and “respect” with the extra work they’re doing.

Lastly, employees do talk about “self-care” and “recharging” as important ways to combat burnout.

To address burnout, it is important for employers to consider both preventative and palliative care:

Preventative care focuses on building good habits and heading off problems before they arrive. Prudently prioritizing key projects and deprioritizing unneeded work are important to ensure appropriate resourcing. Similarly, building a healthy workplace culture that makes expectations clear and respects boundaries across all levels and all managers can help prepare employees, even in busy periods.

Palliative care focuses on ameliorating symptoms but may not address the root cause. For example, self-care through PTO can help burned-out employees recharge. Similarly, recognizing and acknowledging the work employees are putting in can help. Ultimately, however, if employees’ work levels are unsustainable, these measures will only go so far.

Source: https://www.glassdoor.com/Community/the-burnout-bowl-80k1-5/this-is-definitely-a-burnout-epidemic-because-we-are-seeing-this-trend-across-almost-every-industry-the-corporate-world-needs

In 2025

In 2025, burnout is likely to continue to rise. The forces that are pushing employers to be cautious about new investments and hiring are also likely to keep resourcing stretched thin for employees. On a positive note, in the new year, we do see more employers investing in benefits and perks that promote the holistic wellbeing of their employees, which may help mitigate the symptoms of burnout. But on the other hand, this likely won’t address the root cause of burnout, which is tighter budgets and resources contrasted with rising demands for more results. That is likely to exacerbate growing resentment among employees, and may lead to a wave of turnover in 2025 if the job market picks back up and grants opportunities to employees who have the desire to quit. Companies that address the root cause of burnout—not just the symptoms—will be better positioned to retain top employees and foster a healthier workplace culture.

Methodology

We analyze Glassdoor reviews from U.S. full-time or part-time employees who left reviews from January 1, 2016 through March 16, 2025. We categorize reviews based on whether they mention burnout-related terms or not. We identify burnout related terms to include different grammatical constructions of “burnout”; for example, “burned out”, “burning out”, “burn-out” “burn you out” are all counted together.

For the first chart on burnout mentions in Glassdoor reviews over time, we include reviews from current or former employees based on when the review was submitted.

For the table splitting Glassdoor ratings, we analyze recent reviews left from January 1, 2024 through March 16, 2025, filtered only to reviews for current or former employees who held their jobs in 2024 or 2025.

For the chart looking at turnover for Glassdoor reviewers that mention burnout, we identify Glassdoor users who left a review for a currently held job in 2024 and categorize those reviews by whether they mention burnout or not. We then calculate how many job applications those same users start on Glassdoor in the 30 days after the review was submitted. This provides a unique user-level link between review sentiment and turnover intentions only possible in Glassdoor data.

For the chart looking at terms used in Glassdoor reviews that mention burnout, we look at all reviews submitted from January 1, 2024 through March 16, 2025. To count uses of words, we apply some basic natural language processing cleaning techniques including removing punctuation and lemmatizing words to consolidate different forms of the same root word & meaning together.