More than half of U.S. employees (55%) are currently experiencing burnout on the job. Burnout comes at a (literal) price, both for your organization and for the health and well-being of your employees.
Research from SHRM puts it plainly: Employees who feel burned out are nearly three times more likely to be actively job-hunting. They’re also far less likely to go “above and beyond” at work (40% vs. 56%). Beyond the recruitment cost of replacing these workers, that’s a direct hit to productivity and company culture.
In a 2025 Eagle Hill Consulting survey, burned-out workers reported diminished efficiency (72%), a decrease in job performance (71%), and weakened customer service (65%).
Complex scheduling environments that rely on their workers round the clock may feel up against the wall. After all, exhaustion can so easily seem like “just part of the job” when production deadlines are tight and overtime is necessary. To make matters worse, every 24×7 industry, from manufacturing to energy production, is experiencing a shortage of talent.
But it doesn’t — and shouldn’t — have to be this way. Burnout is avoidable. Here’s how the right scheduling and absence management solution can help.
How Common Is Employee Burnout?
An American Job Quality Study revealed that 62% of employees lack a stable/predictable/controllable schedule, and 54% work longer than planned.
Burnout isn’t evenly distributed. It shows up differently by generation, and it hits frontline manufacturing workers and other shift-based teams especially hard. Here’s how it breaks down by generation, according to data collected by Eagle Hill:
- Gen Z: 66%
- Millennials: 58%
- Gen X: 53%
- Baby Boomers: 37%
To address the generational gap, it helps to understand what each group actually needs from their schedule. Indeavor can help you bridge the generational divide through workforce management, with practical ways to manage a multigenerational frontline team.
A 2026 NAMI–Ipsos poll adds more context about what burnout is actually costing employees personally:
- 53% experienced burnout due to their job.
- 26% considered quitting because of it.
- 6% actually resigned.
What Does Burnout Cost Employers?
A landmark Stanford study estimated that workplace stress drives $190 billion in U.S. healthcare spending annually.
A more recent role-by-role analysis in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine estimated the cost of employee burnout per employee per year:
- $3,999 for non-managerial hourly employees
- $4,257 for salaried non-managerial employees
- $10,824 for managers
- $20,683 for executives
89% of these costs stem from presenteeism rather than sick days. In other words, burnout rarely shows up as an employee calling in sick. It shows up as reduced output from employees who are still clocked in.
Scheduling Automation Reduces Human Error
Burnout risk starts with the schedule itself. When schedules are built and managed by hand, small human errors (like unplanned overtime or shifts scheduled too close together) compound into the conditions that drive burnout. Automating the process removes those errors at the source.
How Manual Scheduling Increases Error Risk
If you rely on manual data entry, you need to keep track of all of your employees’ hours yourself. Paper-based scheduling and spreadsheets leave a lot of room for mistakes, including:
- Lost or misplaced records: Paper timesheets and spreadsheets get buried in messy piles or accidentally deleted.
- Duplicate or conflicting entries: The same shift gets logged twice, or two schedulers make changes without seeing each other’s edits.
- Illegible handwriting: Handwritten schedules and time cards are easy to misread, especially across shift changes.
- Accidental overages in hours worked: Without a system flagging totals in real time, it’s easy to schedule someone past their compliance limit without noticing.
Each of these mistakes can mean an employee unknowingly works more hours than planned, gets scheduled without adequate rest between shifts, or burns out due to unpredictable scheduling.
Gain Real-Time Visibility for Managers and Employees
Visibility is what turns error prevention into burnout prevention. With Indeavor, you have visibility into hours worked, overtime rules, and time off all at your fingertips. For managers, automated scheduling equips you with real-time labor information and employee schedules from the comfort of your mobile device.
For employees, Employee Self-Service gives power directly to your shift employees, letting them view schedules, request time off, and volunteer for open shifts, all within the compliance constraints you’ve already set, so no one exceeds the hours they’re allowed to work. Giving employees a self-service way to swap or pick up shifts can also help reduce employee turnover.
From the start, schedulers can create the most optimal shift schedule that takes into account how many hours employees can (and cannot) work. Reducing employee burnout is an inherent part of automated solutions because the guesswork is done for you. Now, you will no longer unknowingly assign an employee too many hours or schedule a person’s shifts too close together (potentially violating rules depending on your industry). The result is less firefighting and more real labor optimization.
Proactively Adjust for Change in Demand
Unpredictable or last-minute schedule changes are one of the most common drivers of burnout. They’re also the most preventable.
- According to an American Job Quality Study, 62% of workers say their schedule isn’t stable, predictable, or something they have real input into, and 54% regularly work longer than they’d planned to.
- Eagle Hill’s 2025 data backs this up, pointing to workload and hours as a top burnout driver.
- A workplace mental health poll from the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) uncovered that 95% of caregivers believe flexible scheduling matters for their mental health.
Demand-based scheduling helps you reduce unnecessary overtime instead of lurching between overstaffed and understaffed shifts.
Another benefit of analytics-driven scheduling is how it can help you proactively adjust for demand.
Maybe your employees are currently overworked because everyone is pulling in way too much overtime to make up for the fact that your organization needs to hire more people. Or maybe your shifts are consistently overstaffed, causing folks to put in unnecessary hours. Whatever the trend, automated scheduling can help identify it and help you limit superfluous hours.
Reduce Employee Burnout With Indeavor
Indeavor helps you manage the two biggest contributing factors to employee burnout — workload/hours and unpredictable scheduling — with automated, compliant scheduling that gives frontline workers more control and managers real-time visibility.
With AI tools like Zeus, Craft Applications, and an Analytics Hub, the results from Indeavor users are clear:
- 6% variable labor spend reduction
- 52% OT reduction
- 47% attrition reduction
- 10–15 hrs/week of supervisor time reclaimed
Indeavor’s workforce management SaaS solution offers clients an end-to-end, cloud-based employee scheduling, time & attendance, and absence management system. It integrates with your human capital management and enterprise resource planning systems to create a robust platform that provides you with real-time employee data.
Employee Burnout Statistics FAQ
What’s the 42% rule for burnout?
The 42% rule is a recovery guideline suggesting that roughly 42% of a 24-hour day (about 10 hours) should go toward sleep and active recovery, like movement, connection, and downtime, with the remaining 58% for work and other demands. The idea is that sustainable performance requires daily recovery built in, not just an annual vacation.
What job has the highest burnout rate?
Burnout tends to run highest in roles with unpredictable hours, high-stakes decisions, and heavy on-call demands.
Among physicians, emergency medicine reports the highest burnout of any specialty, at 49.8%, according to the American Medical Association’s survey of nearly 19,000 U.S. physicians. Urological surgery (49.5%) and hematology/oncology (49.3%) aren’t far behind.
Are frontline and shift-based industries more prone to burnout?
Yes. A Workplace Intelligence study of nearly 13,000 workers worldwide found 75% of frontline employees report feeling burned out. The CDC’s National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health points to unpredictable scheduling, as-needed shifts, and unexpected double shifts as key drivers of burnout. These same scheduling pressures are common across manufacturing, healthcare, energy, and other 24/7 operations.
What are the most common causes of workplace burnout?
According to a survey from Eagle Hill Consulting, employees attribute burnout about equally to two sources:
- The work itself (workload and hours)
- The people side (collaboration, communication, relationships, and management)
Unpredictable or excessive hours are the single most frequently named driver, and a strong sense of belonging at work is linked to a meaningfully lower burnout rate.
How can employers reduce employee burnout?
Employers can reduce employee burnout with:
- Predictable, transparent scheduling
- Workloads and hours that stay within sustainable limits
- A strong sense of belonging, which SHRM’s research found makes employees 2.5 times less likely to report burnout
Giving frontline workers visibility into, and some control over, their own schedules addresses several of these drivers at once.
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