Unlike on the popular TV series Severance, most people don’t get to disconnect from what’s happening in the rest of their lives when they arrive at work each day.
While employees can take steps to manage their stress and anxiety, it’s also imperative that employers have their backs—and foster a work environment that prioritizes mental health.
The constant barrage of unsettling news headlines, economic uncertainty, and concerns about job security creates a heavy cognitive load for many American workers that’s only made worse by an “always-on” hustle culture—which also causes burnout.
To address this systemic exhaustion, the best leaders are those who practice sincere vulnerability and show compassion for their stressed-out workforces, according to experts on workplace mental health.
“If you care about your bottom line and you care about your employees, you should be making mental health a priority,” Bennett Porter, chief of staff for Calm, said during a discussion at the Fast Company Grill at SXSW. “We have to realize that there is a cost to businesses that actually don’t take care of their employees in this way,” she noted.
For those employees who are particularly stressed out, putting on a mask to suggest that everything is fine at work isn’t sustainable, added Ruchika T. Malhotra, CEO of Candour Global and author of the 2025 book Uncompete: Rejecting Competition to Unlock Success. “A bubble bath or like a short vacation or whatever it is, isn’t going to fix chronic burnout,” she said.
HOW MANAGERS CAN HELP
Instead, workers need a manager who has their back and who recognizes the signs of burnout and takes tangible steps to alleviate some of the workplace stressors, Malhotra said. And those leaders who understand the importance of psychological safety and who model vulnerability can go a long way in helping, she added.
In addition to fostering leaders who demonstrate genuine compassion, companies must be a bit more ruthless about eradicating the causes of burnout in the first place, which include chronic overload, not enough resourcing, and toxic leadership, said Laura Hambley Lovett, an organizational psychologist, author, and podcast host.
“Toxic leaders cause chronic harm,” she said, adding that their behaviors hurt worker engagement, productivity, and well-being. “It’s about hiring the right people into leadership, training them, giving them the resources so they can help people thrive and not basically kill people through burnout.”