Longtime Chief Member Alicia Wiedemann is a co-founder and Head of Strategy at creative and marketing agency Summer Friday, where she and her team offer insights to help marketing leaders successfully navigate today’s trends.

For years, burnout looked obvious. Employees resigned in record numbers, openly discussed exhaustion, and pushed organizations to rethink work-life balance. It was visible, measurable, impossible to ignore.

Today it looks different — and if you’re leading people right now, you have more influence over how this plays out than you might think. Employees are staying, but are they engaged? They show up to meetings, answer emails, and meet deadlines, even as employee reviews mentioning burnout climb 65% year-over-year. Burnout hasn’t disappeared — it’s just gone quiet. It’s up to today’s leaders to catch the early signs before they spread further.

The New, Silent Face of Burnout

Organizations are increasingly facing what researchers call silent burnout: people who stay productive on the surface while becoming emotionally exhausted, disengaged, and mentally checked out. It rarely announces itself through resignations. It erodes engagement and creativity gradually, which is exactly why spotting it early matters.

Spring Health’s 2026 Workplace Mental Health Annual Report puts a number on it: HR leaders estimate 30% of employees are experiencing silent burnout, and 40% of employees who’ve already experienced burnout report presenteeism — the act of being physically present but mentally elsewhere. It even shows up where you’d least expect it: the share of positive reviews mentioning burnout rose 35% from 2024 to 2025. Read that twice. Employees who like their jobs are telling you the pace isn’t sustainable. If your best people are the ones absorbing the most without complaint, silence isn’t a good sign so much as a symptom.

Why Your People Aren’t Walking Away — and What That Actually Means

Historically, burnout drove turnover, which at least made the problem visible. Not anymore. The share of workers planning to job search in 2026 dropped to 43%, down sharply from 93% the year before, and employee confidence just hit a record low of 43.8%. That’s people staying because leaving feels riskier. A quiet team isn’t automatically a healthy one, and it’s worth looking closer rather than taking it at face value.

So what’s driving it? Three forces stand out:

Financial stress. 59% of employees say they’re stressed about their finances right now, per PwC’s 2026 Employee Financial Wellness Survey, and 74% say it’s significantly or somewhat affected their mental health. The surprising part: income level barely changes the picture. People you might assume are insulated by seniority or pay are affected just as much — including, quite possibly, your top performers.

AI-driven job anxiety. 72% of U.S. adults worry about AI’s economic effects, and 47% worry specifically about their own job security. That fear is showing up in how people talk about work: AI mentions in employee reviews more than tripled year-over-year, with sentiment running 53% negative, a sharp reversal from a year earlier. Much of it comes down to trust. Employees increasingly see headcount cuts funded by AI investment, with AI cited as the reason after the fact, and they notice the gap. Leaders who are straightforward about what’s actually driving change tend to hold onto that trust; the ones who let AI become a euphemism tend to lose it.

Return-to-office mandates. Half of workers are now required on-site five days a week. Career advisors point to a second motive underneath the stated one: Some organizations use RTO as an indirect way to shed headcount, knowing a share of the workforce will leave rather than give up flexibility. That strategy can backfire — the employees with the most options are often the most willing to walk rather than accept rigid terms, and they’re rarely the ones you can most afford to lose. Naming the real reason, when there is one, tends to land better than letting people guess.

Today’s workforce is a more cautious one, absorbing more than it’s built to carry, and how leaders respond from here will shape a lot of what comes next.

What Silence Is Costing You

This is a moment where paying closer attention pays off. Gallup’s newly released State of the Global Workplace 2026 report found just 20% of employees globally are engaged, 64% are not engaged, and 16% are actively disengaged, with wellbeing (what Gallup calls “thriving”) sitting at just 34%, a slight uptick from the year before. Our workforce is running well below capacity, at scale.

Rather than another wellness perk, the fix is building the visibility to catch disengagement before it becomes a leave, a resignation, or six months of underperformance nobody names out loud. The earlier it’s identified, the more options everyone has.

What Leaders Can Do About It

Burnout is a function of how work is structured and managed — not a personal resilience gap, and not something a Calm subscription fixes. Here’s where the evidence says to put your energy:

  • Invest in manager capability, not just headcount. Manager quality is one of the biggest levers on team-level engagement and burnout, ahead of pay or perks. If your managers aren’t trained to spot early signs and have direct workload conversations, no downstream benefit will make up the difference.
  • Treat workload as a design problem, not a willpower problem. Realistic staffing, clear role expectations, and less administrative drag beat resilience training every time, because they fix the source instead of asking people to simply absorb more.
  • Make disconnection the norm, not just the policy. Presenteeism thrives where “always on” is quietly rewarded, and unlimited PTO means nothing if no one feels safe using it. Build in real mental health days, encourage people to fully unplug when they’re out, and model that respect for personal time from the top down.
  • Say the quiet part about AI out loud. If you’re making cuts and attributing them to AI, your people can likely tell. Being upfront about the real reason tends to build more trust than staying vague.
  • Watch your senior women specifically. The burnout gap widens as you move up, not down. Gallup’s research shows women in leadership have averaged roughly 10 points higher burnout than men in leadership every year since 2022, and McKinsey and LeanIn’s 2025 Women in the Workplace report found 60% of senior-level women report frequent burnout, versus 50% of senior-level men. A generic wellness program built for the average employee will miss the person carrying the most.
  • Measure whether or not support is landing. This is where it pays off in numbers, not just goodwill: Employees at companies that genuinely support mental health are twice as likely to report no burnout or depression at all. That’s a business case, not just a values statement — use it as one.
  • Give people a reason to want to engage. Employees who feel real ownership over meaningful work bring far more discretionary effort than those simply checking boxes. Build in room for genuine ideation, autonomy, and passion projects, and engagement tends to follow.

Where You Come In

Burnout in 2026 shows up in productivity, routine, and people doing just enough to get through the day, all while absorbing financial pressure, AI-driven fear, and RTO disruption.

If you lead people, that reality is closer to you than it might think. You’re disproportionately the one carrying this burnout yourself, and disproportionately the one with the power to change how your organization responds to it. Few people in the room have that kind of leverage.

The usual warning signs show up after the moment to act on them has passed. Don’t wait for them. Find small ways to start today:

  • Check in on your team for silent burnout now, not after the next engagement survey. Ask directly. Notice who’s gone quiet in meetings, not just who’s missed a deadline.
  • Put manager training on this year’s budget, not next year’s wish list. It’s the highest-leverage move on this list.
  • Be candid about what’s really happening with AI. Your people can likely tell either way — being the one who says it plainly builds trust faster than staying quiet.
  • Take the time off you recommend for your team. People believe recovery is safe when they see their leader model it.

You don’t need permission to start any of this. Just make the decision that it’s worth doing.