1 in 5 Highly Engaged Employees Is at Risk of Burnout

A study from researchers at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, in collaboration with the Faas Foundation, focused on the levels of engagement and burnout in more than 1,000 U.S. employees, reports the Harvard Business Review . Although two out of five polled employees reported high engagement and low burnout, one in five reported both high engagement and high burnout. This second group showed desirable behaviors such as high skill acquisition, but also reported the highest turnover intentions in the sample. The implication is that companies may risk losing some of their most motivated and hard-working employees not for a lack of engagement, but because of their concurrent experiences of high stress and burnout symptoms. Half the optimally engaged employees reported having high resources, such as supervisor support, rewards and recognition, and self-effectiveness at work, but low demands such as low workload, low cumbersome bureaucracy, and low to moderate demands on concentration and attention. Meanwhile, experiences of high resources and low demands were rare among the engaged-exhausted employees, most of whom reported experiencing high demands and high resources. It is therefore essential to provide employees with the resources they require to do their job well, feel good about their work, and recover from work stressors. The research suggests company wellness initiatives are not the chief way to respond to employee stress, and instead HR should work with front-line managers to track the level of demands they are imposing on people, along with the balance between demands and resources.