More than half the workforce is burned out. Not tired. Not stressed in the way we have normalised stress. Burned out in the World Health Organisation definition of the word: chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed, showing up as exhaustion, cynicism, and declining effectiveness.
Burnout mentions in employee reviews increased 32% year on year as of Q1 2025, and have risen 50% since before the pandemic. This is the highest rate recorded since data collection began in 2016.
52% of employees reported feeling burned out in 2024. Mid-level managers reported the highest burnout of any group, at 54%.
Pause on that. The people you rely on most to carry change through your organisation are also the most burned out. That is not a coincidence. That is a structural problem with a very specific consequence.One in five employees globally is genuinely engaged at work right now.
One in five.
Global employee engagement fell from 23% in 2023 to 21% in 2024, only the second time it has declined in twelve years. Gallup estimates that two-point slide cost the world economy $438 billion in lost productivity. In 2025, it fell again. Two consecutive years of decline, for only the second time since measurement began.
Here is what that actually means. Walk into a room of ten people in your organisation right now. Eight of them are going through the motions. One of them is actively making things worse. Only one or two are genuinely invested in what you are trying to do.
That is the room you are about to launch your next initiative into.
A manager at capacity does not drive adoption. They cannot. They have nothing left to give it.
What they do instead, completely unconsciously, is transmit the pressure they are carrying downward. They become anxious translators of an anxious message. The change feels heavy to their team not because the change is wrong, but because the person they trust most to make sense of it is themselves overwhelmed.
Manager engagement dropped to 27% globally in 2024. This matters because managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement. A disengaged manager creates disengaged individual contributors. Burned-out employees are 63% more likely to take a sick day and 13% less confident in their performance.
And here is the part that catches organisations off guard: this is invisible in your project reporting until it is far too late to address it. The status report says green. The comms are landing. The training is complete. Underneath all of that, your manager cohort is already at 105% capacity and the initiative is going to stall approximately six weeks after go-live. You just will not know it until then.
Only 44% of managers globally have received any formal management training. More than half of the people responsible for carrying your organisation through change have never been trained to do it.
And yet we keep asking them to do more of it. Faster. On shorter cycles. Without measuring whether they have the capacity.
The assumption that your managers are okay is not a strategy. It is wishful thinking with a Gantt chart attached to it.
The engagement story is bad. The manager engagement story is worse.
While engagement among individual contributors held flat, manager engagement fell from 30% to 27%. Young managers under 35 dropped five points. Female managers dropped seven. No other worker category experienced as significant a decline.
Managers are the transmission layer between your strategy and your frontline. When they are disengaged, the signal does not travel. It does not matter how good the plan is. The plan moves through people. And right now, the people carrying it are running on empty.
Manager engagement levels drive team engagement, which drives productivity. Unengaged teams see turnover rates up to 43% higher than highly engaged teams.
Before you launch your next ERP, your next restructure, your next operating model shift, ask a different question. Not “are our managers aligned?” Ask: “do our managers have the actual capacity to carry this?”
Those are not the same question. Alignment is something you can get in a meeting. Capacity is something you have to measure.
82% of employees are at risk of burnout, yet fewer than half of employers have redesigned work with well-being in mind.
Your competitors are in the same position. The ones who start measuring capacity before launch are the ones whose initiatives actually land.
RhythmEngine measures manager load as part of every diagnostic wave. Know which managers can carry your next initiative before you put more weight on them. Book a 30-minute demo.
