How to avoid manager burnout: 11 steps to the best managers
19 August 2025
Following on from our blog on HR burnout, we’re turning our attention to your managers who are also burning out. The more responsibility a role carries, the more pressure a person feels, so it’s unsurprising that managers are more susceptible to stress and burnout. During this blog, we’ll assess the cause, give tips on reducing burnout, and demonstrate why it pays to invest in creating the best managers.
In a rush? Here are our top three things to know about reducing manager burnout and creating the best managers:
1. Managers are critical to business success, but are highly vulnerable to burnout due to their heavy responsibilities: Managers influence employee retention, mental health, conflict resolution, and overall performance. However, they face significant stress from workload, restructuring, cost-of-living pressures, and lack of support, making them more prone to burnout and even considering quitting.
2. Supporting managers proactively is essential to reduce burnout and improve business outcomes: This includes providing skill development (people, conflict resolution), aligning managers with company goals, offering autonomy, supporting mental wellbeing, regularly reviewing workloads, and fostering work-life balance. Managers also need peer networks and leaders who check in on their wellbeing.
3. Recognition, psychological safety, and a strong sense of purpose empower managers to thrive and lead effectively: Managers should feel trusted, valued, and aligned with the company’s values to lead authentically. Prioritising psychological safety enables them to support their teams better, and personalised rewards and recognition boost motivation and retention.
Got time to stick around? Let's dive a little deeper.
36% of managers are more likely to report feeling burned out. (Forbes)
How can managers impact a business?
Managers impact your business in many ways. They uphold your values, nurture talent, implement strategy, and drive performance. Managers play a role in your employee retention rates, satisfaction and conflict resolution.
These examples of ways managers impact your business reveal why it’s essential to ensure you support managers to be healthy as well as productive.
24% more likely to consider quitting their jobs in the next six months, compared to non-managers. (Forbes)
- Managers support employees to thrive: A supportive and empathetic manager delivers results. We’re not just talking numbers and KPIs. Supportive managers create teams that are 56% less likely to struggle with workplace stress (Forbes).
- Managers support employees' mental health: Employees with a supportive manager who prioritises and recognises the importance of mental wellbeing are 58% less likely to reach burnout (Forbes).
- Managers resolve conflict in the workplace: Managers are often at the forefront of conflict resolution, supporting their teams through conflict, and even acting as a ‘buffer’, protecting their teams from negativity.
- Improve employee retention and satisfaction: Employees who feel managerial support is lacking are 4.5 times more likely to resign (Forbes). Supportive and effective managers make top talent want to stick around, improving employee retention.
What’s causing manager burnout?
We’ve shared four ways your managers impact your business: helping employees be and give their best, supporting their team’s mental health, resolving conflict and improving retention. Your managers are dealing with this on top of their ‘day job’, so it’s understandable that they feel a level of stress that could lead to burnout.
Still, the list of responsibilities on their shoulders doesn’t tell the whole story.
Restructuring
Businesses face an increasing wage bill, and that, alongside other global and economic challenges, has led to many companies reducing their headcount. When organisations restructure their workforce, managers face tough decisions, may lose team members, or even take on additional responsibilities if management numbers reduce.
Cost-of-living crisis
Your managers aren’t immune to the rising cost-of-living crisis. Like the rest of your workforce, they may face money worries. It’s challenging to leave financial anxiety at home, and any workplace stresses can exacerbate the pressure they’re already feeling.
Our blog, ‘How to Support Your Employees During the Cost-of-Living Crisis’, provides insights on how to enhance employee financial wellbeing.
High turnover
Managers are sometimes responsible for high turnover since poor management is the most significant reason employees move on. Whether high turnover is due to their managerial approach or other factors, your managers experience higher levels of stress when your employee retention rates are low.
When employee retention is an issue, your managers lose critical talent and spend more time than necessary recruiting and training new people.
Lack of support
Your managers are a source of support for their teams, but they need to have someone above them looking out for their needs. Managers must have a support network filled with peers who understand their challenges, and leaders who can help them navigate them.
How can you spot a manager in need of additional support?
There are several ways you can identify a manager in need of additional support, including poor engagement scores, high levels of absenteeism and turnover within their team, consistently failing to meet targets, or even through feedback and complaints.
Forbes reports that 65% of candidates applying for managerial positions struggle to demonstrate how they would offer support and guidance to their teams.
That’s at the candidate stage, but what happens when a manager who convinced you of their skills during recruitment fails to deliver on the job?
Other than where there are glaringly obvious failings that turnover, targets, and absenteeism would reveal, how can you spot a manager in need of additional support?
There are three c’s of leadership: character, competence and communication.
- Competence: Is the manager performing their role effectively? What do the various sources of data – the ‘proof points’ we’ve touched on above – tell you?
- Commitment: Is the manager passionate about their team? Do they do everything necessary to help them succeed in meeting collective and individual goals?
- Character: Is the manager empathetic and considerate? Do they work flexibly and openly to meet employee needs, practising what they preach and leading by example?
If any of these three areas are lacking, you need to have a conversation and create a support and development plan to address these areas.
How to avoid manager burnout in 11 steps
We’ve painted a picture of the many factors that contribute to manager burnout. Next, we’ll explore 11 ways to avoid it, including upskilling, offering them autonomy, supporting their wellbeing, recognising and rewarding them, prioritising their psychological safety and more.
1. Develop essential skills
Employees will turn to their manager when they’re struggling with work, have a grievance, or want to discuss their personal struggles. It's the ideal scenario – where a culture of communication is strong.
As is expected in a more senior role, your department managers often take on the stress of their team members. Ensure your managers’ career development and training plans provide them with the people and conflict resolution skills needed to handle any matters brought to their attention confidently.
2. Align & communicate
When the whole organisation is aligned, your managers can deliver and communicate business changes and new initiatives more effectively. Disconnect negatively impacts businesses. Your wider workforce must view their managers as an extension of their voice to avoid an ‘us and them’ mentality, which will create disharmony.
Ensure all managers are aligned and supported, putting them in the best position to represent business leaders whilst championing their teams.
3. Offer trust and autonomy
Whilst it’s essential that there’s consistency and that your team managers are aligned, it’s vital to remember that autonomy also matters. In our blog, ‘Harness the Power of Motivation with Maslow, Herzberg, and Pink’, we share Pink’s theory of motivation, with autonomy being one of the drivers.
Don’t take managers for granted. They’re more senior but still human and have the same needs as the rest of your workforce. Build trust and boost engagement by allowing them to individualise their approach and managerial styles, especially for those who are neurodiverse.
4. Support mental wellbeing
Managers can’t support their teams’ mental wellbeing if they’re struggling themselves.
In our blog, ‘An Employer's Guide to Mental Health at Work’, we reveal that only 2% of employees feel comfortable discussing their mental wellbeing with their employer.
Your managers, who may feel it’s their role to cope, contribute to this figure. An Employee Assistance Programme gives your people a safe space to turn and speak in confidence and confidentiality. Our EAP includes membership to My Best Possible Self, so support is available at the touch of a button.
Additionally, employees can access BACP-accredited counsellors 24/7, 365 days a year, via phone or email, with face-to-face appointments also available.
5. Review workloads
Excess workload is another reason for managers reaching burnout – they have too much on their plate, and the stress and overwhelm become too much. Workload pressures will rise when your business goes through restructuring, if a team member is on long-term sick leave, or a manager takes on additional responsibilities.
You expect your managers to perform, but it’s crucial to regularly review workloads to ensure you’re not pushing them too far.
6. Work-life balance
Managers need a positive work-life balance as much as any other employee – perhaps more so, since they have additional responsibilities and pressures at work. Our blog, ‘The Importance of Work-Life Balance & How Employers Can Enhance it’, helps you understand why work-life balance matters and how, as an employer, you can help your managers achieve it.
7. Community & networks
We mentioned community when we reviewed ‘lack of support’ as a cause of manager burnout. If you have effective managers within your business, have them lead a peer support community to help create a team of the best managers in your industry.
You could also encourage managers to join local or online networking opportunities where they can find additional guidance and mentors.
8. Check in
One of the most important ways of supporting managers is to check in with them. They may lead team one-to-ones, but don’t forget theirs. When you stop by to ask them how they are doing, listen to the answer. Sorry… we mean really listen to the answer, because “I’m fine” and “I’m OK” are default responses and often mask the truth.
9. Create a sense of purpose
Employees want to work for a company that aligns with their values, and this is true of your managers, too. After all, managers must lead by example, be the voice of the wider leadership team and demonstrate desired behaviours. If they don't buy into your business’s ethos, they won’t be leading with purpose, which could see them becoming disengaged, and perhaps leave themselves.
10. Prioritise psychological safety
Psychological safety is becoming part of the workplace dialect because people are recognising its importance. Psychological safety is when employees feel safe being their true selves, where they know they can speak up without being penalised and feel able to take risks (of the calculated variety) and make mistakes.
To be felt across your workforce, psychological safety must begin with your managers, so they can demonstrate to their teams that they can bring their whole selves to the workplace.
11. Recognise & reward
Reward and recognition are just as crucial to retaining and engaging your managers as your other employees. You may set them different goals and targets, but where they take time to recognise their team members, their superiors should be recognising them.
Personalise employee rewards to make them more impactful, taking time to find out what matters most to your people. Some managers may appreciate time off, and others will delight at the sight of a financial reward.
Flexible financial employee rewards
If you’re interested in cost-effective, inclusive and exciting ways to offer your managers a financial reward, read on.
eVouchers
Our eVouchers are a popular choice when employers want to reward their employees financially because they’re so inclusive and flexible. We partner with over 150 retailers, so whatever an employee’s position, hobbies or lifestyle preferences, they can make good use of an eVoucher.
Delivered digitally, they’re an environmentally friendly way to give instant gratification.
Pluxee Card
Another way to deliver instant cash rewards to your managers and employees is via our Virtual Pluxee Card. This streamlined approach puts a cashback-earning prepaid Visa card into your employees’ wallets.
We have over 80 of your employees’ favourite high street and high-end retailers signed up to our scheme, with some offering up to 25% cashback. When you enable cashback earnings on your recognition prepaid card, you’re getting more from your employee rewards strategy, which is perfect when you’re working with tight budgets.
Reduce manager burnout and make the best managers with Pluxee UK
Managers are busy, they face pressures and need to deliver, but they don’t need to burn out.
As we’ve explored, some of the best ways to reduce the risk of burnout and create the best managers only require cultural changes: building trust, communicating effectively, and nurturing autonomy. Others call for a commitment to upskilling your managers to empower them to face whatever may come their way.
Ensure your managers thrive, and they’ll help to create a place where everyone feels they can belong.
Sources: Forbes
FAQs
How do I approach a bad manager?
Are they a ‘bad’ manager, or are there a few areas they need to improve? Assess them against the three C’s and review team data to see if there is a more serious issue to resolve. Be open and honest, explore if there are personal issues at play, and implement a training and mentorship programme to help them become the best manager.
How do I know if a manager is effective?
Effective managers are easy to spot. Their teams are engaged, they meet targets and deliver results for your business.
