Many employees feel stretched thin right now — facing excessive workloads, unclear expectations, and a lack of meaningful connection at work. This kind of burnout quietly erodes people’s motivation and sense of well-being. At the other end of the spectrum, the most fulfilled workers say that they are challenged and inspired in their roles and feel a sense of purpose and belonging.
Tackling burnout can’t just be about adjusting an employee’s choices or routine. Rather, it often requires rethinking the work itself and reevaluating how the organization and its processes function.
“A better approach is to create healthier and more sustainable jobs through good work design,” write Sharon K. Parker and Caroline Knight in their article “Design Work to Prevent Burnout.” Their SMART Work Design model reimagines how jobs can be structured to foster stimulation, mastery, autonomy, relational work, and tolerable demands. By focusing on work structure rather than individual resilience, Parker and Knight argue, organizations can curb burnout before it starts.
At MIT Sloan Management Review, we focus on sharing research that can help leaders strategize ways to make workplaces more successful. As leaders continue to navigate the current level of change — technological, social, and economic — they also need to understand team well-being and engagement and how to maintain them. Rethinking how work is devised is no longer optional — it’s essential. In the 10 articles below, you can explore practical strategies for addressing burnout and creating organizations where people don’t just survive their workdays but actually thrive.
1. The Burnout Age: Real Pain Requires Real Solutions
Brian Elliott
“Nick Petrie, an organizational psychologist, spent five years researching Navy SEALs, surgeons, CIA agents, and business leaders. His research and client work found that most organizations treat burnout as a binary condition: You’re either burned out or you’re fine. …
“Petrie’s research found that rest isn’t the long-term solution. Instead, people need a different approach to personal growth and different workplace conditions. …
“Petrie’s team discovered that high performers operate in two distinct modes: perform mode (exploiting existing skills) and grow mode (exploring new territory). …
“ ‘When you stay in perform mode for too long, people go backwards,’ Petrie said. For instance, ‘doctors and teachers actually get worse over the course of their career, not better, because they get in this mode and repeat the same things over and over.’ …
“Exploring new territory in grow mode is equally important. It is what allows you to develop future capabilities and build resilience.” Read the full article>>
2. How Leaders Fight Back Against Overwork
Melissa Swift
“When we examined the data on effectiveness and motivation, we identified a good-sized chunk of people who reported feeling both pretty effective (getting all or most of what they need to do done on a day-to-day basis) and motivated (highly or somewhat more motivated recently) but also feeling always or often overwhelmed. Twelve percent of our sample felt that way — almost 1 in 8 people.
“I love a counterintuitive finding, but this one really puzzled me. … In my mind, high levels of overwhelm should be productivity and motivation killers, but these folks defied that otherwise logical assumption. These leaders are ‘desert flowers,’ thriving under harsh conditions. …
“The desert flowers were far more likely than the average person to be passionate about trying fixes. They were 43% more likely to consistently try to reduce workload, 55% more likely to regularly try to work more independently, and 48% more likely to habitually try to reduce emotion in the workplace. The action is a big piece of these leaders’ secret sauce for staying motivated and effective even when they feel work is too much: They’re focused, day in and day out, on doing something about it. Read the full article>>
3. Design Work to Prevent Burnout
Sharon K. Parker and Caroline Knight
“Jobs that workers are more likely to find engaging and fulfilling have the following positive characteristics.
“Stimulating work provides task variety, the chance to develop and use one’s skills, and the opportunity to solve challenging and meaningful problems. Jobs that lack stimulation involve highly repetitive tasks that give individuals no chance to improve their skills or gain new ones. Because stimulating work makes employees feel challenged and allows them to grow, it fosters job satisfaction, engagement, and well-being.
“Mastery occurs when people understand their roles and responsibilities, get feedback from peers or supervisors, and see how their work fits into the bigger picture. Most workers want to perform well, yet to do that, they need to know what they are trying to achieve and how well they are doing. A lack of mastery is stressful and undermines worker performance.
“Autonomy ensures that workers have control and influence over when and how they work, including their schedules, opportunities to take initiative, and their daily decisions. Workers with high autonomy develop a sense of ownership, making them more creative and innovative and more likely to apply effort.
“Relational work recognizes the human need to belong, which is vital to feeling engaged and performing well. It provides opportunities for connection with other people through social support, social contact, and teamwork. …
“Tolerable demands refers to the level of effort that workers consider manageable. Job demands can become intolerable when workers must routinely put in excessive overtime to meet them, suffer abuse from customers or colleagues, or are given conflicting priorities. These conditions create extreme pressure that can overwhelm people’s ability to cope. Ensuring that demands are tolerable is one of the most powerful ways to prevent worker burnout.” Read the full article>>
4. With Burnout on the Rise, What Can Companies Do About It?
Dawn Klinghoffer and Katie Kirkpatrick-Husk
“Supporting a person through their career journey is of the utmost importance and the No. 1 driver of thriving in our research. This includes paying attention to people’s career aspirations and providing opportunities to build their skills. According to the Work Trend Index, 76% of employees would stay at their company longer if they could benefit more from learning and development support. …
“Supporting flexible work can also give people a sense of control over their schedule and help reduce feelings of exhaustion. One key here is to collectively establish team norms and expectations around work schedules so that people can be as flexible as they want without feeling stressed about their personal work style.” Read the full article>>
5. How Leaders Help Teams Manage Stress
Allen Morrison and David Forster
“Leaders often misjudge the full range of stressors employees face, fixating on workplace demands while overlooking personal pressures like financial worries, interpersonal conflicts, health issues, or caregiving responsibilities. …
“Leaders don’t need to ‘solve’ employee stress — they can validate it and foster conditions where peers provide support and collaborate on solutions. Since leaders can’t be everywhere, and hierarchies limit openness, teams should develop microclimates of trust. When team members feel responsible for each other’s well-being, it strengthens the organization’s social fabric.
“Stress doesn’t have to corrode culture — it can forge it. When people utilize empathy, self-awareness, and intentional leadership, stress becomes fuel for transformation. It’s how turbulence sparks vitality and how teams evolve from merely productive to deeply connected and fully engaged.” Read the full article>>
6. Four Leadership Loads That Keep Getting Heavier
Melissa Swift
“Four specific areas that most leaders care about have genuinely become more difficult in the past few years: hyping up their teams, getting to the truth, focusing on strategy, and staying sane themselves. But understanding how and why each of these leadership loads has become more difficult to carry can set you on the path to doing better. …
“The average worker receives 121 emails a day — and that’s not counting instant messaging pings, texts, or, God forbid, phone calls. Let’s say that you, as their manager, send 10% of those emails. That’s still more than 100 messages a day that you didn’t send. Those messages could be morale-destroying, truly exciting, or anywhere in between. …
“Continue your ‘ground game’ for keeping the team’s spirits up, in a way that’s authentic to you. But adapt your approach to fight the clutter and the conflicting messages around you. Relentlessly join in the conversation wherever it occurs — and be punchy. A quick, funny GIF, a one-line email, or a two-minute conversation at someone’s desk can all be effective, if that’s where folks are listening. In general, think shorter, more frequent communication, varied across more channels. You can’t be everywhere, but you can make your personal warmth felt in bursts.” Read the full article>>
7. Virtual Meetings and Your Brain: Four Ways to Refresh
Eoin Whelan, René Riedl, Markus Salo, and Henri Pirkkalainen
“In two separate experiments, we analyzed the effects of virtual meetings using electroencephalography (EEG) to measure the activity of the central nervous system, and electrocardiography (ECG) to assess autonomic nervous system (ANS) activation. Electrodes were placed on the head and chest to noninvasively record the brain and heart activity of participants engaged in a virtual meeting. …
“For internal meetings, at least, exclusively using a single, standard, familiar platform can significantly reduce fatigue by minimizing the time and mental energy employees spend navigating different interfaces. When everyone is comfortable with one tool, teams can focus more on collaboration and less on managing technical logistics, thus enhancing overall productivity and reducing unnecessary stress. …
“Project manager Claire told us that for her, ‘it is really important to have the option to hide my self-view in a video meeting. It is really tiring to be constantly seeing myself onscreen. The mirror image makes me feel like I have to look good on camera, which is mentally taxing when repeated throughout the day.’ This type of self-monitoring also drains energy over time by forcing workers to split their attention between the meeting content and their own image. And the self-view mode does not discriminate: Although prior brain imaging experiments have suggested that women react differently, and more adversely, than men when observing themselves onscreen, our neurological experiment and interviews revealed that men are equally susceptible to the exhausting effects of self-view mode.” Read the full article>>
8. What You’re Getting Wrong About Burnout
Liz Fosslien
“The next time you’re about to send an email, take a few extra moments to emotionally proofread what you wrote. Firing off a note at 6 p.m. that says, ‘Let’s talk tomorrow,’ when you mean, ‘Great presentation today; I have a couple comments I’d love to chat through tomorrow,’ can ruin someone’s night. And if you drop an unexpected one-on-one meeting on an employee’s calendar to talk about an upcoming project, let them know right away what the call will be about. Burnout is often the result of chronic stress, so thinking through how your actions and words might be received can prevent you from piling unneeded anxiety onto your team. …
Don’t micromanage. A lack of autonomy puts people on a fast track to burnout. On the flip side, when employees get to make more decisions for themselves, they feel more engaged in their roles and more motivated to do great work. Once you’ve outlined clear priorities and expectations, let people figure out how to reach those finish lines. Be available to answer questions or offer feedback along the way — consider having ‘office hours’ where employees can come and discuss any challenges they’re facing. But avoid inserting yourself into every action they take.” Read the full article>>
9. How to Delegate More Effectively: Four Approaches
Beth K. Humberd and Scott F. Latham
“Delegation still bedevils many leaders. From the overworked manager trying to alleviate burnout to the vice president trying to take a vacation, many leaders need to delegate more but avoid it. Transferring responsibilities to someone else often creates worry, friction, or unsatisfying results. But delegation is not optional: Individuals and organizations can’t grow unless people learn how to effectively delegate both tasks and decision-making. …
“We’ve identified four ways to approach delegation based on whether there is emerging or established trust in people and the organizational process: Empower, Engage, Educate, and Engineer. …
“Conversations around trust in the process or a person’s abilities may be difficult for leaders to initiate, but doing so is critical to ensuring that delegation leads to individual and organizational success.” Read the full article>>
10. Tame Collaboration Complexity
Jack Skeels
“Meetings and their resulting to-do lists increase the need for oversight — which leads to more meetings. A single 30-minute meeting might seem like a small tax on efficiency. But when meetings are multiplied across overlapping projects, they can result in hours of context-switching and time-wasting. …
“There’s a solution to the overmanagement of collaboration. Organizing workers into midsize, multiproject pods — collections of people who mix and match on projects as needed — enables a shift in what managers can and should focus on. Organizing with pods can help managers drop many productivity-sapping activities in favor of a deceptively simple focus: making sure people really understand what they’re working on, using a powerful set of noninvasive metrics to track these more-effective operations. …
“Creating pods for people to work within constrains the ‘noise’ of the larger collaborative organization; pods are the organizational version of turning down the sound so that people can hear themselves think.” Read the full article>>