The Workplace Burnout Crisis Is Fueled By Unrealistic Expectations
Burnout stems from unrealistic goals, chronic overload, and poor capacity planning. The solution is clearer priorities and more realistic expectations.
Shot of a young businesswoman looking stressed out while working on a laptop in an office at night
In 2021, during what many were calling the 'Age of Workplace Wellness,' I led a guided meditation over Microsoft Teams. (Yes, really.) Cameras off, voices quiet, we took ten minutes to breathe together to combat the impending burnout of a major ERP implementation.
I cringe thinking about it now. It was well-intentioned, but even then, I knew I was offering a Band-Aid for a wound I was helping to inflict. Our team alone would go on to burn through eighteen folks before I rolled off the project myself, fried and exhausted.
By 2019, the World Health Organization's definition of burnout was a "workplace phenomenon", not a medical condition. But the cultural focus on building individual resilience in workers stubbornly persisted throughout the pandemic.
Today, most companies have moved beyond mindfulness apps and 'wellness weeks,' but burnout persists: the Deloitte Workplace Burnout Survey finds that almost 70 percent of people feel that employers are not doing enough to prevent or alleviate burnout.
I'd like to think this is not because leaders don't care, but because leaders don't know how to confront burnout's root cause: unsustainable expectations.
Eagle Hill Consulting's 2024 state of worker burnout report finds that the top two causes of burnout are workload and staff shortages. Burnout stems from systemic issues like prioritization failures, capacity mismatches, and chronic urgency. This is not (just) about toxic culture or organizational change. It's about unrealistic goals.
While HR does its best to align the future workforce with quarterly goals, there is still a gap in our ability to assess current capacity and prioritize our teams' focus in the first place. Those companies that do tackle capacity management seem to inevitably fall down the administrative hole of time tracking (sometime to 15-minute increments), adding to workload demands.
Workload design is not about understanding what our teams are doing minute-by-minute. It's about having harder conversations about what our teams shouldn't be doing this week, month, or year.
The answer to burnout isn't a burndown chart. It's more realistic expectations.
If you want your people to thrive while still hitting big goals, here's what needs to change:
Driving results shouldn't mean driving people into burnout. The best-performing teams aren't the ones grinding the longest, they're the ones focusing on what matters the most. Until leaders commit to clear priorities, realistic constraints, and supportive systems, they'll keep watching their best people walk out the door.
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The report states that the hospital "was the first hospital in the U.S. to offer transgender surgeries, doing so as early as 1966" and pointed to a 2022 statement from a spokesperson that stated children should have access to transgender care to "improve their mental health." "The Johns Hopkins All Children's website formerly included a page about children's gender and sexual development," the report says. " It referred to the 'emotional and physical foundation for sexuality"' among 'infants, toddlers, preschoolers, and young school-aged kids.'" Fox News Digital reached out to all five hospitals in the report for comment. "Henry Ford Health respects and fully complies with all state and federal anti-discrimination laws," a Henry Ford Health spokesperson told Fox News Digital in a statement. "For more than a century, Henry Ford Health has been fully committed to serving Michigan's richly diverse communities, providing health care services and employment opportunities to everyone. 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"As one example of factually inaccurate information, Memorial Hermann does not provide and has never provided any form of pediatric gender transitioning treatment to patients younger than 18 years of age at any of our facilities. Secondly, we are compliant with all state and federal price transparency regulations. As the largest nonprofit health system in Southeast Texas, we are committed to delivering compassionate, patient-centered care that provides high-quality outcomes to all we serve. We do not discriminate based on race, gender or any other characteristics, and we abide by ethical and legal standards of care. We are equally committed to ensuring our policies comply with all applicable federal, state, and local laws and regulations." One of the top concerns outlined in the report is what Consumers' Research describes as "insult to injury" when it comes to federal tax dollars propping up these hospitals that are pushing "woke" ideologies and shelling out millions in salaries for top leadership. "Nonprofit hospitals highlighted in this report and across the U.S. receive millions of dollars in federal funding, government-mandated savings programs, and tax exemptions," the report states. "This means taxpayers are often left footing the bill for hospitals' political activism. Hospitals receive nonprofit, tax-exempt status on the basis that they provide a broader benefit to the community. These health systems are able to couple their billions of dollars in tax savings with significant federal funding sources and government-mandated savings programs. These avenues for federal funding include Medicare payments, Medicaid payments, and federal grant funding." The report alleges that these hospitals often "leverage their position" to receive "multiple special designations through Medicare and Medicaid that allow them access to more taxpayer dollars while arguing against federal cuts to current revenue streams." "As outlined in this report, hospitals are taking advantage of their billions of dollars in tax breaks, federal funding, and mandated discount programs to fund frivolous projects outside the scope of patient care," the report alleges. "Instead of passing benefits along to patients and lowering costs – as these programs intended – hospitals use these programs to fund political priorities outside of their core mission of providing high-quality care and benefiting their communities." In addition to the report, Consumers' Research has sent letters to President Trump, Senate and House leadership, and governors of the states where the hospitals are located calling for an investigation into the federal dollar funding streams to the organizations that could be violating anti-DEI rules and running counter to state values. "The content of this Consumer Warning should provide your administration with more than enough justification for initiating a formal investigation into these federally supported hospitals' internal activities and a subsequent review of their tax-exempt privileges and the specific government funding streams which support them," the letter to Trump and officials in his administration states. Additionally, Consumers' Research is running a mobile billboard in Washington, D.C., and launching the website to highlight their warning to consumers. "Consumers need to be aware that hospitals in their own backyards have found ways to use taxpayer dollars to advance a woke agenda, which takes away vital resources that should be going to patient care," Consumers' Research Executive Director Will Hild said in a statement to Fox News Digital. "Our Consumer Warning spotlights five nonprofit hospitals that are prioritizing radical causes like DEI, child sex-change procedures, and climate activism, all while receiving millions in taxpayer dollars. Every hospital CEO should read this Consumer Warning and promptly end woke policies in their organizations and refocus on their core mission, which is providing the best quality patient care at affordable prices. Until every hospital in America stops pushing discriminatory DEI policies, mutilating kids' bodies, and promoting climate politics, their federal funding streams and other government benefits like tax-exemptions should be investigated to ensure taxpayers are not supporting any hospital's reckless ideological activism. It is time to stop funding woke hospitals."
