Manager engagement is falling as organisations ask fewer leaders to absorb more uncertainty, change and emotional pressure. Burnout is not simply a wellbeing problem. It is an enterprise risk that demands organisational redesign, stronger governance and more realistic expectations.

By Frank Farnel | Responsible Public Affairs | 7 August 2026

Manager burnout is often treated as a personal wellbeing problem. The exhausted leader is encouraged to improve resilience, protect personal time, practise mindfulness or take a short break.

Those measures may provide temporary relief. They do not address the management system that produced the exhaustion.

The latest evidence should concern every executive committee. According to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2026, worldwide employee engagement fell to 20% in 2025. Manager engagement dropped even more sharply – from 31% in 2022 to only 22% in 2025. Engagement among non-managers stood at 19%. Gallup estimates that low engagement cost the global economy approximately $10 trillion in lost productivity during 2025. The findings suggest that much of the recent deterioration originates with the people expected to lead teams through it.

This is the burnout blind spot. Organisations scrutinise employee engagement while overlooking the condition of the managers responsible for creating it.

Executive Summary

Managers have become the shock absorbers of modern organisations.

They translate strategy into execution, implement restructurings, manage performance, introduce artificial intelligence, maintain morale, resolve interpersonal tensions and explain executive decisions they may not have helped make. At the same time, many organisations are widening spans of control, removing management layers and leaving vacancies unfilled.

When managers become exhausted, the consequences travel through the organisation. Decisions slow down. Recognition disappears. Difficult conversations are postponed. Priorities become less clear. Employees receive less support, while emerging operational and ethical problems are more likely to remain undetected.

Burnout prevention must therefore move beyond wellness programmes. It requires leaders to examine workload, staffing, decision rights, organisational contradictions, managerial autonomy and recovery time.

• Burnout is an organisational signal, not evidence of personal weakness.
• Managers cannot create engaged teams when the management system leaves them depleted.
• The most effective interventions change the design of work, rather than merely helping employees endure a damaging design.

Key Evidence

• 20% – Global employee engagement in 2025, the lowest level since 2020. Gallup, 2026
• 22% – Global manager engagement in 2025, down from 31% in 2022. Gallup, 2026
• 79% – Manager engagement in Gallup’s best-practice organisations in 2025. Gallup, 2026
• 65% – Reduction in sick days during the UK four-day-week pilot. UKRI, 2024
• 57% – Reduction in staff departures during the same UK pilot. UKRI, 2024
• 33% – Reduction in reported stress during Unilever New Zealand’s trial. Unilever, 2022

The figures describe reported engagement and pilot outcomes; they do not establish that every intervention will produce identical results.

Burnout Is About Work

The World Health Organization classifies burnout in ICD-11 as an occupational phenomenon rather than a medical condition. It associates burnout with three dimensions: sustained exhaustion, growing psychological distance or cynicism towards work, and declining professional effectiveness. This definition matters because it locates the phenomenon within the working environment.

Yet many employers continue to respond as though burnout were primarily a failure of personal coping.

They provide meditation applications without reducing workload. They organise resilience workshops while preserving contradictory objectives. They encourage people to disconnect while rewarding executives who send instructions late at night. They offer wellbeing days but expect the same volume of work to be completed in less time.

These initiatives can become a form of resilience theatre: visible evidence that the organisation appears to care, without changing the conditions that create the problem.

The WHO recommends organisational interventions that assess and modify workplace risks rather than relying exclusively on individual treatment. These risks include excessive workloads, low control, unclear responsibilities, discrimination, harassment, job insecurity and inadequate staffing. The principle is clear: preventing harm requires action on the working environment itself.

The Job Demands-Resources Model

The Job Demands-Resources model provides a useful theoretical framework for understanding manager burnout.

Developed by Evangelia Demerouti, Arnold Bakker, Friedhelm Nachreiner and Wilmar Schaufeli, the model divides working conditions into two broad categories:

• Job demands require sustained effort and consume physical, cognitive or emotional energy.
• Job resources help people complete their work, retain control, learn, recover and remain engaged.

The foundational research found that high demands were strongly connected to exhaustion, while inadequate resources were particularly associated with disengagement. It also demonstrated that the framework could be applied across different professions.

For a manager, demands may include an excessive span of control, constant organisational change, emotional responsibility for employees, conflicting executive instructions, recruitment freezes, after-hours communication and accountability without authority.

Resources include adequate staffing, clear priorities, decision-making power, executive support, reliable information, training, peer relationships, psychological safety and sufficient time for recovery.

Burnout becomes more likely when demands remain persistently high while resources are removed. This explains why a highly capable manager can function well in one organisation and become exhausted in another. The difference may not be personal resilience. It may be the structure surrounding the role.

Why Managers Have Become Organisational Shock Absorbers

The modern manager works between two competing realities.

From above come demands for growth, efficiency, transformation and speed. From below come legitimate expectations for clarity, fairness, recognition, development and humane treatment.

The manager is expected to reconcile them.

During restructuring, executives may announce a new operating model in a carefully prepared presentation. Managers must then explain what it means to individual employees whose responsibilities, careers or jobs may be affected.

During technological transformation, senior leaders may promise productivity gains from artificial intelligence. Managers must identify which processes can actually change, reassure anxious employees, redesign responsibilities and maintain performance while the new system is introduced.

When resources are constrained, managers are often instructed to do more with less. The phrase sounds efficient in an executive meeting. Operationally, it may mean postponing recruitment, increasing workloads, shortening deadlines and asking managers to conceal the strain from their teams.

The manager thus absorbs the difference between strategic ambition and organisational capacity. That difference has limits.

Real-Life Failure: France Telecom and Institutional Harassment

The France Telecom case demonstrates what can happen when harmful managerial pressure becomes embedded in corporate policy.

On 21 January 2025, the French Court of Cassation recognised institutional psychological harassment in the France Telecom litigation. The ruling established that a corporate policy implemented with knowledge of its damaging effects on working conditions could fall within the criminal prohibition on psychological harassment, even when the policy did not target one specifically identified employee.

The case should not be reduced to the misconduct of a few local managers. Its deeper significance lies in the relationship between strategy and implementation.

A restructuring policy may be approved at the highest level, but its human consequences are transmitted through management layers. Managers may be placed under pressure to secure departures, mobility or behavioural change while being denied the authority and resources needed to manage those processes responsibly.

Three governance lessons follow:

1. A strategic objective does not legitimise harmful implementation.
2. Senior leaders remain responsible for the foreseeable human effects of the systems they create.
3. Human-resources indicators cannot be separated from operational and executive accountability.

The question for a board is not simply whether a restructuring achieved its numerical target. It is whether the methods used to achieve that target respected health, dignity and professional integrity.

Real-Life Redesign: The United Kingdom’s Four-Day Week Trial

The United Kingdom’s four-day-week pilot offers a contrasting example.

Sixty-one organisations and almost 3,000 workers participated in a six-month experiment involving a 20% reduction in working time without a corresponding reduction in pay. Researchers found that more than two-thirds of participating employees reported lower burnout, while 39% reported lower stress.

The organisational results were equally significant. Sick days declined by 65%, departures fell by 57%, and revenues among the 23 organisations providing comparable data increased by an average of 1.4% during the trial. One year later, 56 of the 61 participating organisations were still operating a four-day week.

The most important lesson is not that every organisation should immediately close on Fridays. The participating organisations did more than remove a working day. They shortened meetings, reconsidered processes, used technology more effectively and questioned work that consumed time without creating sufficient value.

They redesigned the demand-resource equation.

A poorly designed four-day week could simply compress five days of pressure into four. A successful one removes inefficiency and protects recovery while maintaining clear performance expectations.

Real-Life Experimentation: Unilever New Zealand

Unilever pursued a similar experiment in New Zealand before extending the trial to Australia.

Employees retained full pay while working approximately 80% of their previous hours, provided that business performance remained stable. Following the New Zealand trial, 67% of employees reported improved work-life balance, stress declined by 33%, and reported strength and vigour at work increased by 15%.

Again, the essential point was not the number of days. It was the willingness to test a different operating model and measure both business and human outcomes.

The experiment treated working time as a management variable rather than an untouchable tradition. It also demonstrated that wellbeing and performance should not automatically be regarded as opposing objectives.

From Wellbeing Programme to Governance System

Burnout prevention should be incorporated into the organisation’s governance architecture.

ISO 45003 provides guidance for managing psychological health and psychosocial risks within an occupational health and safety system. It applies to organisations of every size and sector and emphasises prevention, evaluation and continuous improvement. It offers boards and executive teams a useful starting framework.

A credible governance system should examine at least five dimensions.

1. Workload

Leaders should understand not only the number of hours worked but also workload intensity, fragmentation and unpredictability. Ten hours of concentrated work are different from ten hours interrupted by constant messages, conflicting meetings and shifting priorities.

2. Control

Responsibility without authority is a powerful source of exhaustion. Managers need clear decision rights over staffing, priorities, performance and resource allocation.

3. Role Clarity

Managers cannot protect their teams when executive priorities change continuously or when every initiative is presented as urgent. Strategy requires choices about what the organisation will stop doing.

4. Organisational Support

Managers need access to HR, occupational health, legal and senior leadership support before a situation becomes a crisis. Asking for assistance should not be interpreted as evidence of managerial weakness.

5. Recovery

Rest cannot remain an informal privilege available only to people confident enough to claim it. Recovery periods, reasonable communication boundaries and protected leave must be part of the operating system.

What Leaders Should Do Now

A practical response can begin within 90 days.

Above all, do not ask managers to solve structural overload through personal resilience. Give them the authority, staffing, clarity and recovery time required to lead effectively.

During the First 30 Days

Map the organisation’s most exposed managerial roles. Examine spans of control, vacancies, working hours, meeting loads, after-hours communications, sick leave, employee-relations cases and regretted departures. Hold confidential discussions with managers about demands they can no longer absorb. Ask which recurring activities create little value and which executive contradictions cause the greatest pressure.

During the Following 30 Days

Reset priorities and decision rights. Remove low-value reporting requirements and unnecessary meetings. Identify positions where recruitment freezes or management-layer reductions have created unsustainable workloads. Give every major transformation programme an explicit people-risk assessment.

By Day 90

Present the findings to the executive committee and board. Establish a limited number of psychosocial-risk indicators alongside financial and operational measures. Assign responsibility for corrective action to operational executives, not only to HR. Publish the principal commitments internally and report progress at regular intervals.

Conclusion: The Manager Is Part of the Infrastructure

Organisations often speak about managers as though leadership capacity were infinitely renewable. It is not.

Managers are part of the organisation’s critical infrastructure. They connect strategy with execution, executive decisions with human reality, and institutional values with everyday behaviour.

When that infrastructure deteriorates, engagement surveys are not the first problem. They are the warning light.

The decline in manager engagement should therefore be treated as evidence of organisational imbalance. Wellbeing benefits may help individuals, but they cannot compensate indefinitely for excessive demands, inadequate resources and contradictory leadership.

The strongest organisations will stop asking how to make managers more resilient to a dysfunctional system. They will ask how to build a system that does not consume the people responsible for holding it together.

Analytical Support: From Symptoms to System Redesign

This diagnostic table translates recurring warning signals into system-level questions and governance responses.

Warning signal	Likely system imbalance	Governance response
Persistent overload	Demand exceeds staffing, time or process capacity	Remove low-value work; reset priorities; review spans of control
Responsibility without authority	Insufficient control and unclear decision rights	Clarify mandates; delegate budget and staffing authority
Cynicism or withdrawal	Low recognition, weak support or repeated value conflict	Strengthen executive sponsorship; address ethical and role conflict
High turnover or absence	Chronic resource loss and inadequate recovery	Audit psychosocial risks; redesign workload; protect recovery time
Silence and delayed escalation	Low psychological safety or fear of consequences	Create protected speak-up routes; measure response quality

Glossary

BurnoutA work-related occupational phenomenon associated with exhaustion, growing distance or cynicism towards work, and reduced professional efficacy.Job demandsAspects of work that require sustained physical, cognitive or emotional effort.Job resourcesConditions that support performance, autonomy, learning, recovery and engagement.Psychosocial riskA risk arising from work design, organisation, management or social conditions that can affect psychological or physical health.Institutional harassmentHarassment arising from an organisational policy that knowingly degrades working conditions, as recognised in the 2025 France Telecom judgment.Span of controlThe number of employees or functions for which a manager is directly responsible.

Source and Methodology Note

Research cut-off: 7 August 2026. The article prioritises primary legal and institutional materials, peer-reviewed research, and first-party corporate evidence. Survey results and pilot-programme findings are reported as published by their sponsors and research partners. The four-day-week trials involved self-selecting organisations and should not be treated as proof that the same model will work unchanged in every sector. The article distinguishes burnout as an occupational phenomenon from medical diagnoses and does not offer clinical or legal advice. The France Telecom discussion reflects the Court of Cassation’s 21 January 2025 judgment and authoritative legal commentary; it is used as a governance case study, not as an allegation about current Orange management.

References and Further Reading

Official and Institutional Sources

1. Gallup. State of the Global Workplace 2026. Gallup, 2026.
2. World Health Organization. Burn-out an Occupational Phenomenon: International Classification of Diseases. WHO, 28 May 2019.
3. World Health Organization. Mental Health at Work. WHO, 2 September 2024.
4. International Organization for Standardization. ISO 45003:2021 – Psychological Health and Safety at Work. ISO, June 2021.
5. International Labour Organization. Psychosocial Risks and Mental Health at Work. ILO, accessed 7 August 2026.
6. European Agency for Safety and Health at Work. Psychosocial Risks and Mental Health at Work. EU-OSHA, accessed 7 August 2026.
7. Cour de cassation, Chambre criminelle. Decision of 21 January 2025, no. 22-87.145, ECLI:FR:CCASS:2025:CR00003. Published in the Bulletin, 21 January 2025.

Academic and Theoretical Works

1. Demerouti, E.; Bakker, A. B.; Nachreiner, F.; Schaufeli, W. B.. The Job Demands-Resources Model of Burnout. Journal of Applied Psychology 86(3), 499-512, 2001.
2. Bakker, A. B.; Demerouti, E.. The Job Demands-Resources Model: State of the Art. Journal of Managerial Psychology 22(3), 309-328, 2007.

Case Studies and Applied Evidence

1. UK Research and Innovation. Making the Case for a Four-Day Working Week. UKRI/ESRC, 31 October 2024.
2. University of Cambridge. Would You Prefer a Four-Day Working Week?. University of Cambridge, 21 February 2023.
3. Unilever. Four-Day Work Week Trial to Start in Australia. Unilever, 1 November 2022.
4. Clifford Chance. France Telecom Case: French Supreme Court Recognizes Institutional Psychological Harassment. Clifford Chance, 29 January 2025.

Suggested Internal Links

• Authentic Leadership: A Practical Guide to Building Trust and Influence
• How Ethical Leadership Builds Workplace Integrity
• Learning from Failure: Transforming Setbacks into Strengths

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