Leadership · 5 min read
Why Your Team Feels Burnt Out?
A team can be completely overloaded and still not be burnt out from overwork. The wearing-down part is usually the hours spent on work that was never going to move the result.
Key Insights
- Burnout tracks more closely with how work is managed than with how many hours it takes.
- A large Gallup study found that role clarity, manager support, and reasonable time pressure predict burnout better than workload alone.
- Separate research on where the workday actually goes found that a majority of a typical week is spent on work about the work, not the work itself.
- Removing tasks without changing the mix of what’s left rarely fixes burnout, because the ratio of real work to busywork stays the same.
- The more useful question isn’t how much the team is doing. It’s how much of what they’re doing was ever going to matter.
What "Busy Doing the Wrong Things" Means
A team can be working full days, hitting every deadline, and still be running out of energy for reasons that have nothing to do with the number of hours on the clock. What wears people down is spending real effort on tasks that were never going to move the result, while the work that would have moved it keeps getting pushed to next week. The fix for that isn’t fewer hours. It’s a different mix of hours.
That distinction matters because the two problems get treated as the same problem, and they call for opposite fixes. Cutting hours on an overloaded team helps. Cutting hours on a misdirected team just means less of the wrong work gets done, at the same pace of exhaustion.
Why Hours Worked Isn't the Variable That Predicts Burnout
Gallup’s research on burnout, based on a study of nearly 7,500 full-time employees, found five factors that predict burnout more strongly than raw workload does. Unfair treatment at work topped the list. Employees who feel they’ve been treated unfairly are over twice as likely to experience high burnout. Role clarity was close behind: only 60% of employees in the study strongly agreed they understand what’s actually expected of them, and the ones who don’t spend real energy just guessing (Gallup, “Employee Burnout: The Main Causes”).
The same research found that employees who feel genuinely supported by their manager are about 70% less likely to burn out regularly, and employees who feel they have enough time to do their work well are also about 70% less likely to burn out, regardless of how much work that actually is. None of the five factors Gallup identified was simply “too many hours.” All five were about whether the hours being worked had a clear target and a fair shot at succeeding.
Where the Hours Go?
A separate line of research answers a different but related question: once someone sits down to work, where does the time actually go. Asana’s Anatomy of Work Index, tracking how people spend their working hours, found that a majority of the typical workweek goes to what the report calls work about work: status updates, searching for information, switching between tools, and coordinating who’s doing what, rather than the strategic or creative work the role exists to do (Asana, Anatomy of Work Index).
Line that finding up against Gallup’s role-clarity number and a pattern comes into view. A team spending most of its week coordinating and updating, rather than producing, is also a team that’s likely fuzzy on what actually counts as done. Those two things reinforce each other. Unclear priorities generate more status checks and more coordination, and more coordination leaves even less time to make the priorities clearer.
What Changes When You Fix the Mix?
The instinct when a team says they’re burnt out is to lighten the load: cancel a project, push a deadline, hire another person. Those moves can help, and sometimes they’re exactly right. They also leave the underlying ratio untouched if the work that gets cut is chosen at random rather than by what it was actually accomplishing.
A more durable fix starts with the same kind of audit that works on a misallocated marketing budget rather than a misallocated calendar, the same logic covered in the piece on why a campaign problem is usually a blind spot instead. Look at where a week’s worth of hours actually went, not where the calendar said they were supposed to go, and compare that against what the team was actually hired to produce. The gap between those two lists is usually where the exhaustion is coming from.
How to Check What Your Team Is Spending Time On
None of this requires new software or a survey. Pick one week and have each person on the team log their hours into three plain categories: producing the actual work product, coordinating about the work, and everything else. Most teams doing this for the first time are surprised by how small the first category turns out to be.
Compare that split against what the team’s goals actually require. If coordination is eating the week, the fix is usually fewer touchpoints and clearer ownership, not more meetings about alignment. If role clarity is the gap, a short, direct conversation about what each person owns often does more than any process change. Either way, the number worth watching isn’t hours worked. It’s the share of those hours that were ever going to produce the result the team is there for.
Related reading: the Articles hub collects more pieces on where marketing time and budget actually go. For a longer conversation on this topic, see the KRTCL HIT podcast.
Behtash Moojedi writes on marketing budgets, attribution, and growth, drawn from 12 years of finding results inside budgets companies already have.