What Causes Burnout? And How Can You Tell if it’s Impacting Your Team? A Session with Oliver Brecht 

To kick off the Center for Organizational Effectiveness’ four-day virtual summit, Thriving in Uncertainty: Leadership and Wellbeing in Turbulent Times, Oliver Brecht, Vice President and General Manager of Enterprise Solutions at the COE, led a powerful session on “Leadership’s Role in Combatting Burnout and Building Sustainable Work Culture.”  

In this session, Brecht challenged leaders to broaden their understanding of burnout—not as a buzzword or a temporary bout of stress, but as a systemic, workplace-driven phenomenon. Drawing on current literature and WPO’s extensive EAP data, he unpacked what truly drives burnout, how it differs from general exhaustion or fatigue, why a structural approach to prevention is essential—and how organizations can put that approach into action. 

From poor leadership to limited autonomy, Brecht outlined key organizational contributors to burnout, before offering practical benchmarks and strategies leaders can use to build more resilient, sustainable work environments. 

Read an excerpt from the session below: 

Brecht: Taking the World Health Organization’s definition, burnout is strictly an occupational phenomenon. It’s driven by a chronic imbalance between job demands and job resources. So, effectively, it’s when we’re operating in a state where the negative components of work consistently outweigh the positive ones. 

It’s important to recognize that burnout is not simply stress. It’s not just fatigue or exhaustion. It’s different from those things—and one of the key ways organizations can better address burnout is by really understanding that distinction. Burnout stems from specific, structural aspects of the workplace, and those need to be the primary focus when we think about how to respond. 

So, what are some of the core causes of burnout? 

Based on a high-level literature review, we’ve identified roughly eight core causes. One of the major ones is toxic workplace culture. That erodes the job resources that typically come from a collegial atmosphere. 

Leadership support is another key factor. When there’s a lack of support from leadership, it can have a significant impact. 

Workload and job demands, the physical work environment, and work-life balance are all additional components. 

Then you’ve got factors like employee autonomy—the ability for people to use their judgment, apply their skills, and approach tasks in a way that works for them. That has a moderate impact. 

Recognition and fairness also fall into that moderate impact category. 

And finally, access to mental health resources is critical. That has a high impact. Every job includes some level of stress—deadlines, ups and downs, successes and setbacks. We can’t eliminate stress entirely from the workplace. But what we can do is ensure people have the right support in place. Mental health resources are a big part of that. 

So why do these things lead to burnout? 

It’s not just the exhaustion or cognitive overload. The real issue is that these factors begin to disconnect people from the purpose of their work. They erode an individual’s sense of meaning and value in what they do. 

We all go to work for different reasons. For some, it’s achievement. For others, financial security. For some, it’s connection, skill development, or wanting to make an impact beyond themselves. But when those workplace challenges start to pile up, they create distance between the person and the purpose. The cost of work starts to outweigh the value of what they’re getting from it. 

That’s where burnout begins—when that sense of purpose starts to erode. 

Exhaustion or fatigue happens when you’re not able to recover enough, when your output consistently exceeds your input. But that’s not necessarily burnout. If you’re still connected to the “why”—if you’re overexerting yourself for something that matters to you—you’re usually able to bounce back. 

Burnout sets in when that connection to purpose is lost. When your effort no longer feels worth the reward, that’s when you’re most vulnerable. And that’s why burnout is distinctly a workplace issue. 

Now, we’ve all heard the big stats. Burnout is costing trillions of dollars a year. One in four—or one in two—will experience it at some point in their career. But those numbers can feel abstract. It’s hard to translate them into something meaningful for you as a leader: What do those statistics actually mean for your organization? 

What I want to do now is offer some indicators—some practical ways to assess whether burnout might be a challenge in your workplace, and to what extent. Let’s try to bring those big figures—the trillion-dollar impact, the one-in-two stat—down to the level of: How do I know if that’s us? How do I know if we’re overrepresented in those numbers? 

To do that, we looked at key burnout-related factors within the presenting issues in our WPO EAP data. This gives us a really rich dataset to benchmark against—to help identify what’s typical and what might be signs of a deeper issue. 

So, looking at our 2025 data—based on more than 135,000 cases—we found that, on average, if more than 17.4% of your EAP presentations relate to workplace concerns or work-based issues, that suggests your work environment is having a higher-than-average impact on your people. That’s a top-level indicator that burnout could be an organizational risk. 

So what does this mean? And how can leaders use this information to address to burnout?… 

Want to dive deeper into the data and uncover practical strategies for building a sustainable workplace culture? 

Want more insights like this? Click here to view the full library of session recordings from #2025COEWeek.