Burnout: The Invisible Leak Draining Your Workforce and How to Stop It.

The Silent Crisis

In the relentless pursuit of efficiency and growth, a quiet but potent crisis is unfolding within workplaces globally: burnout. As organizations navigate economic pressures, a common strategy is to ask employees to “do more with less.” While this may seem like a short-term solution, a new report from Glassdoor’s Chief Economist, Daniel Zhao, reveals a troubling consequence. The silent epidemic of burnout is no longer just a personal issue; it is a systemic challenge, silently corroding employee well-being, satisfaction, and, ultimately, a company’s bottom line.

This deep dive into Glassdoor’s findings reveals the true cost of unaddressed burnout. It is a slow-burn problem that, left unchecked, can ignite a wave of disengagement and high-performing talent turnover. But this doesn’t have to be the case. Jungji believes that with the right insights and proactive strategies, you can make the invisible visible, transform stress into a source of strength, and build a more resilient and humane workplace.

Key Findings: What the Data from Glassdoor Says

The Alarming Rise of Burnout Mentions

The data couldn’t be clearer. According to Glassdoor reviews from Q1 2025, the share of reviews mentioning burnout has increased by a staggering 32% year-over-year, reaching its highest level since the data began in 2016. This is 50% higher than pre-COVID-19 levels, confirming that this is not a temporary fluctuation but a growing, widespread crisis. Employees are not just feeling the pressure; they are actively calling it out in their professional reviews.

This upward trajectory signals that the current methods of managing employee well-being are simply not keeping pace. The psychological and physical toll of being “stretched increasingly thin without an end in sight” is being felt by workers across every industry.

How Burnout Corrodes Employee Satisfaction

When burnout takes hold, it doesn’t stay confined to one aspect of an employee’s experience. Glassdoor’s analysis shows a powerful ripple effect across all workplace factors. Reviews that mention burnout rate their employers a dismal 2.68 out of 5 stars, a 26% drop compared to reviews that don’t mention burnout. This is more than a simple drop in morale; it’s a wholesale erosion of trust and satisfaction.

The impact is most acutely felt in certain areas:

• Work-Life Balance: The biggest hit is to work-life balance, with satisfaction ratings 34% lower for burned-out employees. This confirms that the feeling of being overextended is the most direct symptom of burnout.
• Senior Management: Perceptions of leadership also plummet, with ratings 29% lower. Employees often attribute burnout to poor strategic decisions—such as insufficient planning and resourcing—at the senior level, suggesting a crisis of confidence in leadership’s ability to protect the workforce.
• Culture & Values: Company culture also suffers, with a 25% drop in satisfaction. Burnout is increasingly seen not as a personal failing, but as a systemic issue perpetuated by a “churn and burn” culture.

These findings make it clear that burnout is a powerful, contaminating force that colors an employee’s entire perception of their workplace.

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

Source: Glassdoor reviews, U.S. full-time or part-time reviews, January 1, 2024 through March 16, 2025

The Hidden Costs of a “Slow-Burn Crisis”

Burnout is insidious because it’s a slow-burn crisis. It builds up over time, gradually wearing down even the most satisfied and high-performing employees. The data reveals that reviews mentioning burnout are 26 times more likely to use terms like “unsustainable,” pointing to the inevitable breaking point.

This unsustainability leads directly to significant, yet often hidden, costs for the business. As the report points out, the extra work is a “slow-burn problem that builds up over time… But burnout can also contaminate the rest of an employee’s experience as workers might start to become jaded.” This is where the long-term damage truly sets in.

A Deeper Look: The Human and Organizational Impact

The Crisis of Leadership and Culture

The Glassdoor report shines a light on a critical issue: burnout is not seen as a flaw in the employee but as a flaw in the organization itself. Employees who are experiencing burnout are less satisfied with senior management and feel that the company’s culture and values are not aligned with their well-being. This is a direct attack on the very foundation of an organization.

• For employees: Burnout makes them feel undervalued and disrespected. They feel caught in a “sink or swim” environment where their boundaries are not respected.
• For managers: This creates a difficult position, caught between the demands of senior leadership for results and the realities of a strained, burnt-out team. They are asked to do more with less while managing a crisis of morale.
• For organizations: A culture that tolerates burnout risks becoming a “churn and burn” environment, where top talent is lost and the remaining employees are left to shoulder an even greater load. This is not a sustainable model for success.

The Surprising Turnover Risk

The most sobering data point in the report is the undeniable link between burnout and turnover. Reviews that mention burnout are 59% more likely to result in a job application within 30 days. But here is the most critical insight: it’s not the already-disgruntled employees who are the biggest flight risk.

The largest increases in turnover intent come from those who are otherwise satisfied:

• 5-Star Employees: A 58% increase in turnover intent for employees who rate their company 5 stars but mention burnout.
• 4-Star Employees: A 66% increase in turnover intent for employees who rate their company 4 stars and mention burnout.

This means that your most valuable, engaged, and high-performing employees—the ones who truly love their job but are being pushed to their limit—are the most likely to walk away without warning. As the report puts it, “It’s the employees who are otherwise satisfied that are the most concerning flight risks, as these are often high performers or regrettable turnover.” The data confirms that burnout is not just a productivity problem; it is a talent retention emergency.

Jungji’s Perspective: From Stress to Strength

The Glassdoor report paints a clear picture of the problem: a silent, corrosive, and costly epidemic of burnout. The data also offers a clear path to a solution, identifying key fixes employees are asking for: “self-care,” “recharge,” “boundaries,” “recognition,” and “respect.”

At Jungji, we see these requests not as a list of demands, but as an opportunity for transformation. Burnout is not a failure; it is a signal. It is your organization and your people communicating a need. We believe in turning that signal into actionable, data-driven insight that empowers both leaders and employees. This is where Jungji’s Guide and Magician archetypes come to life.

The Guide: Decoding Burnout for Managers

Jungji acts as a Guide, offering clarity and support in a chaotic environment. Our first step is to demystify burnout and make the invisible visible. The Jungji Humanrisk Indexes platform provides a clear, zero-knowledge snapshot of your organization’s well-being. Using just two data points per employee—the RCF (Readiness) Index, which measures their ability to engage with work, and the BPI (Performance Loss) Index, which quantifies the financial impact of stress—you can immediately see where problems exist, even before they hurt your business.

For managers struggling to navigate the pressure from both directions, our platform provides a crucial playbook for self-improvement and team management. With a quick Personality Profiling, managers get an instant read on their own psychological needs, stress triggers, and a path to recharging their own batteries. The platform provides bite-sized, low-effort “Quick Wins” and a crystal-clear playbook for collaborating smoothly with every teammate by understanding their core personality profiles. This empowers managers to lead with empathy and make better decisions, turning a source of stress into a source of strength.

The Magician: Practical, Proactive Solutions

Jungji embodies the Magician by turning abstract problems into tangible, actionable solutions. Our Burnout-to-VND Calculator transforms the fuzzy sentiment of burnout into a hard-currency P&L leak, showing executives the exact financial cost of well-being issues in a format that speaks to them. This allows you to justify investments in people with a clear ROI, shifting the conversation from a “soft” psych issue to a strategic business imperative.

For proactive, data-driven action, Jungji’s Executive-Ready Cards provide a one-click drill-down from the company level to a specific department or team. Each card comes with a cost-saving projection and a clear action list you can deploy tomorrow. This turns a complex problem into a simple, manageable, and highly impactful task. Our platform helps you proactively prevent burnout through personalized self-care workshops and wellbeing dashboards, which provide a clear, real-time view of your organization’s health. By identifying stress before it manifests as sick days or turnover, you can implement targeted interventions and build a culture of sustainable resilience.

Conclusion: Your Proactive Path to a Healthier Workplace

The Glassdoor report is a wake-up call. Burnout is a genuine threat to your company’s talent, culture, and profitability. But the future is not pre-written. The path forward is one of clarity, empathy, and proactive action—a path that honors the well-being of your employees and, in doing so, safeguards the health of your business. By embracing a data-smart approach, you can move from a reactive state of damage control to a proactive state of cultivation.

Jungji’s mission is to give you the tools to make that transformation. We empower leaders and managers to understand their people not as resources, but as individuals with unique needs. We provide the data to see problems before they arise and the playbook to solve them with care. The health of your people is the health of your business.

Empower Your People. Safeguard Your Business.

Visit Jungji today to take the first step towards a more resilient and humane workplace culture.