Employee burnout leads to exhaustion, reduced productivity, and mental strain, affecting overall well-being.

The Health and Economic Burden of Employee Burnout to U.S. Employers
Go to source). For a company with 1,000 employees, this could mean an average annual loss of $5 million. These estimates come from a computational simulation model developed by the Public Health Informatics, Computational, and Operations Research (PHICOR) team at the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy, in collaboration with researchers from Baruch College, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of San Diego’s Knauss School of Business.
‘Ever wonder how much #burnout really costs a company? A new model finally puts a number on it. Makes you think... #worklife #burnout’

“Therefore, it can give companies and organizations a better idea of how focusing more on employee well-being could help decrease costs and increase profits," says Bruce Y. Lee, CUNY SPH professor, PHICOR and Center for Advanced Technology and Communication in Health (CATCH) executive director, and senior author of study. 




A Customizable Model of Employee Stress and Disengagement Across Job Roles
The computational model simulates an employee who moves through different stages ranging from active participation at work to disengagement and burnout over time depending on what stressors the employee encounters. One can specify the position of the employee (e.g., hourly non-manager, salaried non-manager, manager, or executive) and what state that employee is in initially (e.g., engaged, burned out, leave their job, overextended, disengaged, or ineffective).As time in the simulation proceeds, the employee has probabilities of encountering different stressors that relate to the workplace (e.g., workload, community, control, rewards, fairness, and value) and non-workplace (e.g., family, cultural and psychological environment, financial, and health).The number of stressors and the type of stressors (workplace, non-workplace) that an employee experiences during a two-week period determines if the employee stays in the same state or moves to a different state. While the employee is in a given state, that employee has certain productivity levels and experiences different possible health effects.
The team then ran the model to estimate the resulting cost to an employer when different employees experience different types of disengagement and burnout at different times. For example, an hourly non-manager employee going through burnout would cost an employer on average $3,999 (95% range: $3,958-$4,299). These costs would be on average $4,257 (95% range: $4,215-$4,299) for a salaried non-manager, $10,824 (95% range: $10,700-$10,948) for a manager, and $20,683 (95% range: $20,451-$20,915) for an executive. If one were to assume that a 1000-employee company has the typical distribution by employee type (59.7% non-managerial hourly, 28.6% non-managerial salaried, 10% managers, and 1.7% executives), then the costs of employee disengagement and burnout to the employer would total $5.04 million (95% range: $5.03-$5.05 million) annually. There would also be an associated 801.7 (95% range: 801.5-801.9) quality-adjusted life years lost each year.
All of this quantifies the substantial impact that employee disengagement and burnout has on the employer’s bottom line. These costs range from 0.2-2.9 times the average cost of health insurance and 3.3-17.1 times the average cost of employee training to employers. These results also give a sense of how much employers might want to invest in preventing disengagement and burnout. There are a number of possible interventions that could reduce the risk of disengagement and burnout from companies offering mental health benefits to financial literacy programs to properly managing employee workloads. However, each of these do require financial commitments to establish and maintain.
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Reference:
- The Health and Economic Burden of Employee Burnout to U.S. Employers - (https://www.ajpmonline.org/article/S0749-3797(25)00023-6/abstract)
Source-Eurekalert