How to talk to an employee who is burning out

Burnout conversations go wrong in a specific way: the manager notices, worries, waits for a good moment, and eventually raises it with so much cushioning that the person can comfortably say "I'm fine" and both of you can move on relieved. Three months later they resign.

How do you know it is burnout and not a bad month?

You do not, and it is not your job to know. It is your job to notice the change and say so.

What you can observe is a difference from how this person normally operates. The reliable signals are behavioural rather than emotional:

• Withdrawal from things they used to drive. They stop volunteering, stop pushing back in planning, go quiet in the meetings they used to run.
• Uncharacteristic slips. Missed handovers, forgotten commitments, work arriving late without the usual heads-up.
• Hours creeping without output moving. Messages at 11pm and at weekends, and less finished than before.
• Flatness. Not sadness — flatness. Things that would have annoyed them six months ago do not register.

None of that is a diagnosis. All of it is describable, which is what you need.

How do you open it?

By describing, and then stopping.

"I wanted to check in properly. Over the last few weeks you've been online a lot later than usual, and you didn't pick up the client handover last Thursday, which isn't like you. I'm not raising it as a performance thing — I'm asking because I'm a bit concerned. How are you finding the pace at the moment?"

Three things are doing work there. You gave specifics, so it cannot be brushed off as a general impression. You explicitly separated it from performance, which is the fear the person is sitting with. And you finished on an open question rather than a verdict.

Then be quiet, for longer than is comfortable. This conversation is more dependent on silence than any other. The person is deciding in real time how honest to be, and that decision takes seconds of nothing.

Why does "let me know if you need anything" fail?

Because it moves the work to the person with the least capacity to do it.

Someone who is depleted cannot audit their own workload, decide which piece to hand over, work out who could take it, and then ask their manager for relief. Every step of that is effort, and the whole problem is that effort is what has run out. An open offer feels generous to the manager and lands as one more task.

The alternative is to make the decision yourself and present it. "I'm taking the Henderson report off you this month. I'll do it. Nothing changes on your review." Specific, already decided, no negotiation required.

What if they say they are fine?

Most people will, the first time. Treat that as information rather than as an answer.

Say what you have seen once more, briefly, and leave a door:

"That's fair enough, and I might be reading it wrong. What I'd say is — the late nights and the Thursday handover are the two things I noticed, and both are unusual for you. If it's nothing, genuinely, tell me and I'll drop it. If it's something and you'd rather talk in a fortnight than today, that's fine too."

Then book the fortnight. The follow-up in the calendar is what separates a real conversation from a gesture, and it is the part managers skip most often.

What should you actually change?

One thing, this week, that they will notice by Friday.

The instinct is to design a plan: rebalanced workload next quarter, a hiring conversation, a review of how the team is resourced. All of that may be right and none of it helps someone who is struggling now. A change three months out is indistinguishable from no change.

Pick the single heaviest thing and remove it. Cancel a recurring meeting they do not need to be in. Move a deadline that you control. Take one deliverable yourself. Then say plainly that this does not count against them, because that is the thing they are most worried about and will not ask.

If the pressure is coming from targets rather than volume, the shape of that conversation is different — talking about missed targets without crushing motivation deals with the case where the numbers are the stressor.

How do you keep it from becoming a performance conversation?

By not mixing them, in either direction.

If there are genuine performance issues, they still exist, and they do not disappear because someone is exhausted. But raising both in one meeting means the person hears only the performance half, and they will hear the concern as the setup for it. Deal with the wellbeing conversation now and the performance one in a fortnight if it is still relevant. In many cases it will not be, because the performance problem was the exhaustion. If it is still there afterwards, the underperformance conversation is a separate meeting with a separate structure.

The reverse matters too. Do not let concern become an excuse to avoid a performance conversation indefinitely. "They've been under a lot of pressure" is true and can quietly last two years.

What if the whole team is running hot?

Then the conversation is still worth having individually, and the fix is not.

Managers sometimes hold back from raising it with one person because everyone is stretched, and singling someone out feels unfair. That reasoning is backwards. The person you noticed is the person showing signs now; the fact that others might be next is an argument for acting sooner, not for saying nothing.

What changes is where the solution sits. If four people are all at capacity, removing one deliverable from one of them just moves the problem sideways. That is a resourcing conversation with your own manager, and it needs the same specificity you would bring to any other hard conversation: not "the team is stretched" but "we committed to six deliverables this quarter with capacity for four, and here is what I propose we drop."

Have the individual conversation this week anyway. It costs you thirty minutes and it tells the person that someone noticed, which is frequently the thing they most needed.

What do you do about the cause?

Whatever part of it is yours.

Sometimes the cause is a workload you set, a deadline you agreed to, or a habit of routing every urgent thing to the same reliable person. That last one is extremely common and rarely deliberate: the best person on the team absorbs the most work precisely because they absorb it well.

If that is what happened, say it. "Looking at the last two months, I've been giving you the urgent things because I know they'll land. That's not sustainable and it's my mistake." A manager who names their own contribution gets a far more honest conversation than one who treats the situation as weather.

Where the cause is outside work, you will not fix it and should not try. Adjust what you control, point at whatever support genuinely exists, and be flexible without making them ask twice.

What does the follow-up look like?

Short, and it happens.

Two weeks later, fifteen minutes: has the change helped, is there a second thing to remove, how are they sleeping. If nothing has improved and they are willing to talk, that is the point to involve whatever formal support your organisation has — occupational health, an employee assistance line, HR.

The general principle underneath all of this — describe, stop, listen, commit to something specific — is the same one that runs through every hard conversation a new manager has. It is set out in full in the complete guide to difficult conversations for new managers, and the one-to-one is where most of these signals surface first, which is why your first 1:1 as a new manager matters more than it looks.