What gets rewarded gets repeated. And right now, many leaders, teams, and entire organizations are rewarding stress and burnout.
The team member who “goes the extra mile.”
The manager who cancels time off to meet a deadline.
The leader who emails during their vacation instead of disconnecting.
When these behaviors are modeled, recognized, and rewarded, it sends a dangerous message that stress means you care, and overwork means you matter. Over time, those messages become cultural norms. The more overwhelmed you are, the more indispensable you appear. High stress becomes synonymous with high performance.
The result? A fast track to burnout disguised as dedication.
What is Burnout?
According to the World Health Organization, burnout is an occupational phenomenon resulting from unmanaged chronic workplace stress. Burnout is characterized by three dimensions:
- feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion;
- increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job; and
- reduced professional efficacy.
Burnout isn’t simply a personal failure or a lack of resilience — it’s fundamentally a system problem, created when job demands consistently exceed the resources available to do the job well.
Why Do We Reward Burnout?
To understand why burnout gets rewarded, we need to look at where those rewards come from. Burnout behaviors are often reinforced by others and ourselves.
External rewards appear when workplaces applaud the very behaviors that contribute to burnout — overworking, constant availability, saying yes to everything. Working late is visible. Stress is visible. And when those behaviors earn praise or recognition, it sends a clear message: this is what success looks like around here.
Internal rewards can be quieter but just as powerful. We feel a sense of pride when we push through exhaustion. We validate ourselves for doing more, taking on more, and being more. Over time, burnout behaviors become a personal badge of achievement — something we reward and repeat, even though it’s harmful.
To change the outcome, we have to change what we recognize and reward.
Three Things to Do Instead
Burnout is preventable, and if you’re already there, it’s reversible. To create meaningful change, we need to shift behaviors and recognition at three levels of the workplace: individuals, teams, and organizations.
Individuals can’t solve burnout alone; however, there are two important things they can do. First, they can start by focusing on their well-being, including sleep, exercise, connection, and rest. And second, individuals can take steps to complete the stress cycle, allowing the body and brain to recover from stress. Stress is physiological, and without a release, it accumulates into chronic stress or burnout. Completing the stress cycle doesn’t need to take a lot of time or effort – deep breathing, physical movement, or even a positive social connection can help.
Teams have a unique ability to support each other, or to unintentionally make stress worse. Teams can help prevent burnout by building trust, strengthening connections, and keeping communication open. They can prioritize psychological safety — a shared belief that it’s okay to speak up, ask for help, or admit you’re overwhelmed.
Teams can also normalize healthy conversations about stress. When stress is acknowledged and discussed rather than ignored or celebrated, teams can take action together. They become each other’s first line of defense against burnout, rather than another source of it.
Organizations must address the systemic root causes of burnout, or nothing will change. Gallup’s latest report on burnout lists the following top five root causes of burnout:
- Unfair treatment at work
- Unmanageable workload
- Unclear communication from managers
- Lack of manager support
- Unreasonable time pressure
Organizations can begin by assessing which of these root causes are contributing to burnout and then redesigning what gets rewarded.
The Reward of New Rewards
When organizations stop rewarding behaviors that lead to burnout and start rewarding those that support sustainable performance, everything changes. Well-being becomes a shared responsibility and a shared value.
And perhaps the greatest reward is that people will no longer have to choose between doing great work and taking care of themselves.
