Why wellness benefits still aren't helping employees with burnout

Employee burnout has been a concern since before the pandemic. Yet nearly four years since the start of COVID, employees are still struggling — and employers keep coming up short.  

According to a recent Fiverr report, 85% of business leaders acknowledge the existence of employee burnout as a significant issue in the workplace, but while there's awareness among their bosses, employees still feel they aren't being given adequate enough resources to prevent burnout in the professional environment.

"The conversation around burnout has evolved," says Edward Beltran, CEO of leadership development and training company Fierce. "Now it's considered a top C-suite level initiative for many companies and they'll have some type of wellness, resilience and mental health benefit. But they look at these initiatives as if they're required by the workforce — they see it and they recognize it, but they can't tie it to business results so it gets pushed down to HR just to check the box."

Read more: After COVID, this healthcare worker quit her full-time job to escape burnout

Sixty-two percent of employers currently offer an EAP to promote mental health in the workplace, while 46% rely on digital health tools and 43% prefer education to address these needs, according to  Wellable Labs. While 91% of employees agreed that their mental health was negatively affecting their productivity, a report by One Medical and Workplace Intelligence found that less than a fifth said they used their mental health care benefits. 

"There's this discrepancy in perception between what the employers believe they're providing and what employees believe they're receiving," Beltran says. "Employees are out there experiencing the world and they're not connecting to  resources. They're not ingrained in the culture and they're not making it palatable for employees."

As a result, HR managers themselves end up overworked and overwhelmed. They lack the training to identify the right resources, and they don't use them, either, Beltran says. The cycle repeats itself. 

Read more: Managers and employees at odds over RTO, mental health and more

"There's training and skill sets that you can give people that help them address these issues," he says. "There are tangible interactions between colleagues, [rather than] relying on benefits that tackle exercise, or a better diet, or sleep. Those help manage stress, but they don't get down to the issues or what's happening in their day-to-day."  

In order to build a system that adequately targets and addresses burnout in the long term, employers need to treat managing burnout like any other profit-driver. This means investing their time, their energy and their resources into training on de-escalation techniques and behavioral management, as opposed to adding elective benefits that aren't what those employees are looking for today.  

"Employers need to recognize that this is a real cost to the business," Beltran says. "We're seeing a shift away from managing burnout not because wellness benefits are too expensive or because it can't work, but because their current strategies are not scaling as they are."