Burnout is a problem for employers around the world. A 2024 Gallup study estimated the annual cost of worker burnout and disengagement at $8.9 trillion, or 9 percent of global GDP. That calculation factors in a range of negative productivity effects from burnout, including higher rates of absenteeism, turnover, and work errors; reduced focus and concentration at work; and increased health care costs from the physical effects of stress and exhaustion.

The costs to employers may be even steeper in Mexico, where long work weeks (among the longest in the world) contribute to high levels of workplace stress and stress-related exhaustion.

What Is Burnout?

“Burnout” may sound like a term for exhaustion and in conversation it is often used that way, but it has a more precise definition as a combination of three dimensions. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), employees are experiencing burnout when they feel:

• Exhausted by work demands and work stress
• Distanced from and cynical about their work
• Ineffective in their jobs

It’s important to note that burnout is not a disease or a condition (something that might be treated and cured in an individual), but rather a problem directly related to chronic workplace stress. The remedy for burnout won’t come from teaching employees how to manage their stress (although that can help). Rather, it lies in identifying the conditions of work that are creating chronic stress, taking steps to make work less stressful and more engaging, and ensuring the ready availability of support when employees need it.

What Conditions at Work Drive Burnout?

Research studies have found the following factors in the work environment to be the most significant drivers of employee burnout:

• Unmanageable workload, excessive work hours
• Lack of control over one’s work due to micromanaging, lack of autonomy, or lack of clear role definition
• Demotivating leadership
• Toxic work relationships, including bullying or harassment
• Lack of fairness, including employees’ perception of favoritism, bias, or discrimination
• Lack of a sense of belonging
• Lack of a supportive work environment
• Insufficient rewards and recognition
• Misalignment of values between the employee and the organization

What Employers Can Do

Employers in Mexico will recognize many of these drivers of burnout as the psychosocial risk factors that are the target of NOM-035, the 2018 labor law. That’s no accident. NOM-035, like similar laws in other countries, was enacted to boost workforce productivity by reducing employee stress and trauma (which can lead to burnout) and building worker engagement (which can be seen as the opposite of burnout). Steps taken by an organization to comply with NOM-035 will therefore align with the steps needed to address employee burnout. These include:

• Talk to and survey employees to understand their experiences of work and the prevalence of workplace stress, feelings of overload, problems with work/life balance, disengagement, and burnout. Ask questions and listen to what employees say. If using the survey tools mandated by NOM-035, it’s useful to add open-ended questions that enable respondents to share their thoughts and experiences in their own words.
• Identify the drivers of burnout in the organization. These should emerge from conversations with and surveys of employees, and are likely to vary by location, function, and team.
• Work on addressing the most significant drivers of burnout. Start with small-scale changes and experiments with particular work groups to see what’s possible, how much effort and cost is involved, and what changes have the biggest impact on employee engagement and productivity. Then implement the most promising changes more broadly, paying close attention to local and cultural factors.
• Train managers on how to lead for engagement. Train them, too, on how to be supportive when employees come to them with emotional or stress-related problems. Make sure managers know how to discuss work-related problems in appropriate and constructive ways, and how to refer an employee to the EAP for support with emotional issues and issues stemming from problems outside of work.
• Provide support to employees to help them deal with stress, difficult emotions, and mental health problems and to help them navigate difficult work conditions with greater resilience.

While employee burnout is a drain on employee productivity and evidence of unhealthy stress among employees, addressing burnout can be a wonderfully transformative process. It involves turning negatives for the organization and its people into positives—and turning weaknesses into strengths. When an organization pays attention to burnout, in Mexico or anywhere in the world, it demonstrates that it cares about and is listening to its people, and that it wants them to be successful—at work and in their lives outside of work.

How Workplace Options Can Help Mexican Employers Address Worker Burnout

Workplace Options, the leading global provider of employee wellbeing services, provides consulting services to help organizations maximize the value of their human capital.

Our direct support to employees includes:

• Immediate 24/7 access to telephone or video counseling with an Employee Assistance Program professional
• Scheduled in-person sessions with a qualified mental health counselor
• Easy-to-access online self-help information and tools
• On-site and online training on stress management, work effectiveness, and work-life balance topics for employees and managers

Our consulting services include:

• Survey/questionnaire administration, results analysis, and reporting
• Consulting on organizational change to address psychosocial risk factors

Reports of aggregate data from the employee wellbeing service can also help organizations identify both drivers and negative effects of workplace stress within their organizations. Across all of the organizations we serve in Mexico, for example, anonymized case data shows that workload, unclear objectives, struggles with work-life balance, and difficulty performing to the job’s expectations are the most significant drivers of workplace stress, and that the most common negative effects are difficulty concentrating, anxiety or panic, low mood, physical symptoms, and disengagement from work. Organization-level data on the drivers and effects of work stress can be a helpful diagnostic tool.