Employee burnout can cost employers millions each year

A 1000-employee company may lose $5.04 million annually

CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy

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New York, NY | February 27, 2025: Employee burnout is likely costing companies millions of dollars each year, ranging from approximately $4,000 to $21,000 per employee in the U.S., according to a study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. That means a 1,000-employee company in the U.S. would on average be losing about $5 million annually. These estimates are based on a computational simulation model developed by the Public Health Informatics, Computational, and Operations Research (PHICOR) team based at ​​the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy (CUNY SPH) working with researchers from Baruch College, Johns Hopkins University (JHU), and the University of San Diego (USD) Knauss School of Business.

“Our model quantifies how much employee burnout is hitting the bottom line of companies and organizations,” says Bruce Y. Lee, CUNY SPH professor, PHICOR and Center for Advanced Technology and Communication in Health (CATCH) executive director, and senior author of study. “Therefore, it can give companies and organizations a better idea of how focusing more on employee well-being could help decrease costs and increase profits."

The computational model simulates an employee who moves through different stages ranging from active participation at work to disengagement and burnout over time depending on what stressors the employee encounters. One can specify the position of the employee (e.g., hourly non-manager, salaried non-manager, manager, or executive) and what state that employee is in initially (e.g., engaged, burned out, leave their job, overextended, disengaged, or ineffective).

As time in the simulation proceeds, the employee has probabilities of encountering different stressors that relate to the workplace (e.g., workload, community, control, rewards, fairness, and value) and non-workplace (e.g., family, cultural and psychological environment, financial, and health).The number of stressors and the type of stressors (workplace, non-workplace) that an employee experiences during a two-week period determines if the employee stays in the same state or moves to a different state. While the employee is in a given state, that employee has certain productivity levels and experiences different possible health effects.

The team then ran the model to estimate the resulting cost to an employer when different employees experience different types of disengagement and burnout at different times. For example, an hourly non-manager employee going through burnout would cost an employer on average $3,999 (95% range: $3,958-$4,299). These costs would be on average $4,257 (95% range: $4,215-$4,299) for a salaried non-manager, $10,824 (95% range: $10,700-$10,948) for a manager, and $20,683 (95% range: $20,451-$20,915) for an executive. If one were to assume that a 1000-employee company has the typical distribution by employee type (59.7% non-managerial hourly, 28.6% non-managerial salaried, 10% managers, and 1.7% executives), then the costs of employee disengagement and burnout to the employer would total $5.04 million (95% range: $5.03-$5.05 million) annually. There would also be an associated 801.7 (95% range: 801.5-801.9) quality-adjusted life years lost each year.

All of this quantifies the substantial impact that employee disengagement and burnout has on the employer’s bottom line. These costs range from 0.2-2.9 times the average cost of health insurance and 3.3-17.1 times the average cost of employee training to employers. These results also give a sense of how much employers might want to invest in preventing disengagement and burnout. There are a number of possible interventions that could reduce the risk of disengagement and burnout from companies offering mental health benefits to financial literacy programs to properly managing employee workloads. However, each of these do require financial commitments to establish and maintain.

“Burnout is pervasive and it’s costing organizations millions each year,” said Molly Kern, professor at the Zicklin School of Business at Baruch College and co-author of the study. “Organizational leaders need to consider how their cultures and benefits programs support the 60% of employees silently struggling with burnout."

Funding: This work was supported by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences of the National Institutes of Health via award number U54TR004279, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) via grant 1R01HS028165-01, the National Institute of General Medical Sciences as part of the Models of Infectious Disease Agent Study network under grants R01GM127512 and 3R01GM127512-01A1S1, the National Science Foundation via award number 2054858 and U.S. Agency for International Development under Agreement No. AID-OAA-A-15-00064. Statements in the manuscript do not necessarily represent the official views of, or imply endorsement by NIH, AHRQ, the US Department of Health and Human Services or USAID. None of the study sponsors had any role in study design; collection, analysis, and interpretation of data; writing the report; or the decision to submit the report for publication.

Declaration of Conflict of Interest: No financial disclosures have been reported by the authors of this paper.

Media contact:
Alexis Dibbs
dibbs.alexis@gmail.com

About CUNY SPH

The CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy (CUNY SPH) is committed to promoting and sustaining healthier populations in New York City and around the world through excellence in education, research, and service in public health and by advocating for sound policy and practice to advance social justice and improve health outcomes for all.

About PHICOR

Since 2007, PHICOR, Public Health Informatics, Computational, and Operations Research (www.PHICOR.org) has been developing computational methods, models, and tools to help decision makers better understand and address complex systems in health and public health. Follow @PHICORTeam on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Twitter for updates.

About JHU

The mission of Johns Hopkins Medicine is to improve the health of the community and the world by setting the standard of excellence in medical education, research and clinical care.

About Baruch College

Backed by a long tradition of excellence in higher education, the Zicklin School of Business is located within Baruch College—an institution that consistently ranks among the region’s and nation’s top performers in academic excellence, diversity, and value.

About University of San Diego’s Knauss School of Business

The Knauss School of Business at the University of San Diego (USD) is committed to developing socially responsible leaders with a global mindset through values-based education and innovative research. Together, we work to advance sustainable and ethical business solutions that address the world's greatest challenges.

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Journal

American Journal of Preventive Medicine

DOI

10.1016/j.amepre.2025.01.011 

Article Title

The Health and Economic Burden of Employee Burnout to U.S. Employers

Article Publication Date

27-Feb-2025

 

Burning question: How to save an old-growth forest in Tahoe

Management key to conserving old-growth forests in seasonally dry west

University of California - Davis

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A UC Davis field crew measures a large ponderosa pine while conducting forest inventory in the Emerald Point old-growth stand at Lake Tahoe. Ancient ponderosa pines that once grew in a open-canopied forest now confront waves of fire-intolerant firs and incense cedars that have taken advantage of a century of fire suppression.

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Credit: Hugh Safford, UC Davis

On the shores of Lake Tahoe at Emerald Bay State Park grows what some consider to be the most iconic old-growth forest in the Lake Tahoe Basin. Giant ponderosa pines — some of the last remaining in the area — share space with at least 13 other tree species. 

Yet despite its high conservation value and proximity to severely burned forests, the Emerald Point stand has not been managed to reduce its risk to drought or catastrophic wildfire. The fire-adapted forest has also not experienced fire for at least 120 years. This has led to massive increases in forest density, fuels, and insect- and drought-driven mortality.

A fire modeling study conducted by the University of California, Davis, and the University of Nevada, Reno, found that forest thinning followed by a prescribed burn could greatly improve the stand’s resistance to catastrophic fire. The study, published in the journal Fire, indicates that such treatments could also help other seasonally dry, mature, old growth forests in North America. 

“I know it sounds cliché, but we need to fight fire with fire,” said lead author JonahMaria Weeks, a recent Ph.D. graduate from the UC Davis Department of Environmental Science and Policy. “When it comes to the conservation of old growth stands like the one at Emerald Point, prescribed fire is an essential management tool in reducing the risk of complete loss due to catastrophic wildfire.” 

Big, dense and dry

The Emerald Point stand supports the largest remaining ponderosa pines in the Lake Tahoe Basin. Some trees are more than 200 centimeters, or 6.5 feet, in diameter. Other sizable residents of the stand include Jeffrey pines and California incense cedar.

Old forests like this used to dominate California’s mountain landscapes. Frequent, low severity fire was critical to their long-term persistence in the Sierra Nevada. It removed fuels, knocked back competitive but fire-intolerant tree species, and drove evolutionary selection of traits that protected the pines from most fire damage. But the arrival of Euro-American and other settlers in the late 19th century brought with it a fear of fire and more than a century of fire exclusion. 

Most large ponderosa pines at Lake Tahoe were logged in the 1800s to support silver mining. Although the Emerald Point stand was spared, a lack of low-severity fire has made the stand far more dense, as historical photos and accounts indicate. Surface fuels and tree death also have increased, the latter driven by water stress and insect outbreaks linked to the forest stand’s high density. 

Modeling fire behavior

Several severe wildfires have burned in the southern Lake Tahoe Basin over the past two decades. The 2018 Emerald Fire burned just 1.25 miles south of the study site, and the 2021 Caldor Fire damaged or destroyed numerous old-growth forest stands.

To explore wildfire risk to the Emerald Point stand, the authors modeled potential fire behavior under severe fire weather conditions using plot data collected at the site. They simulated four fuels management scenarios to test the efficiency of each in reducing fire risk:

• The most conservative scenario included no thinning or fuel removal.
• The most intensive scenario used historical, pre-1850s forest conditions as a target. It removed most trees between 8 to 32 inches diameter at breast height followed by a fall prescribed fire.
• A third scenario included hand thinning followed by pile burning.
• The final scenario was a spring prescribed fire treatment without thinning.

Two scenarios — no management and the spring prescribed fire — suffered complete stand mortality from the simulated wildfire. The hand thinning plus pile burning scenario and the historically based thinning plus prescribed fire scenario suffered only minimal losses. 

The authors determined that the management scenario based on historical conditions was most likely to help old trees at Emerald Point persist. The paper poignantly acknowledges the loss of the Beaver Creek Pinery old-growth forest on the Lassen National Forest to the 2024 Park Fire. Plans to reduce fuels in that stand had been discussed for years but were never implemented.

Conservation alone won't protect forests

“The conservation of old growth in dry conifer forests of the American West is impossible without due consideration and mitigation of wildfire risk,” said senior author Hugh Safford, research faculty in the UC Davis Environmental Science and Policy department. “After 100-plus years of fire suppression and loss of most of the old trees on our landscapes, it is reckless and short-sighted to think that mere protection of old growth in fire-prone landscapes will conserve it.”

Instead, Safford said conserving old-growth forest at Lake Tahoe and other fire-dependent ecosystems means actively managing the forest in ways that replicate the essential ecological roles of fire. 

Additional coauthors include Bryant Nagelson and Sarah Bisbing with the University of Nevada, Reno.

The study was funded by the USDA Forest Service Pacific Southwest Region and CalFire. 

Tree density has greatly increased through time at the Emerald Bay study site. The top photo was taken in 1883, and the bottom photo was shot in 2018.

Credit

Courtesy California State Parks

In 2011, UC Davis researchers trained visiting forest restoration specialists from Lebanon in measuring surface fuels, tree regeneration, and forest structure at the Emerald Bay stand. Note the high levels of surface fuels. Fire risk is high in the stand, due to the removal of frequent low severity burning as an ecological process.

Credit

Hugh Safford, UC Davis

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Journal

Fire

DOI

10.3390/fire8020070 

Article Title

Burn to Save, or Save to Burn? Management May Be Key to Conservation of an Iconic Old-Growth Stand in California, USA

 

Study explores how climate change impacts extreme cold events

University at Albany, SUNY

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Aiguo Dai, Distinguished Professor in UAlbany’s Department of Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences.

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Credit: Patrick Dodson

ALBANY, N.Y. (Feb. 27, 2025) — Despite being among the warmest years on record, eastern China was hit by an unexpected extreme cold event in December 2023 that caused transportation shutdowns, power supply shortages and agricultural damage. 

A new study led by Qian Cheng from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in collaboration with a team of researchers including Aiguo Dai from the University at Albany, examined the 2023 event to better understand how the warming effect of climate change drives or suppresses these types of extreme cold waves.   

Their analysis found that the event could largely be attributed to unusual large-scale atmospheric circulation (wind patterns), which accounted for 83 percent of its intensity. However, they also found that the warming effect of climate change reduced the event’s severity by up to 22 percent. 

Findings were published in the journal npj Climate and Atmospheric Science.  

“Extreme cold events, like the one in China in December 2023, often have major impacts on various sectors of our society,” said Dai, a Distinguished Professor in UAlbany’s Department of Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences. “Understanding how these events may change due to climate change can help us to stay better informed and prepared for the future. It also gives us more insight into how these events occur under a warming climate.” 

To reach their analysis, the researchers used a combination of historical weather data and climate simulations to estimate how atmospheric circulation and global warming contributed to the 2023 cold event. 

Using similar techniques, they also found that the likelihood and intensity of similar cold events has already dropped by over 92 percent and 1.9 degrees Celsius, respectively, compared to a world without the current global warming trends. They are projected to become even rarer and milder by the end of the century—decreasing in frequency by 95 percent and more than 2 degrees Celsius. 

Dai cautions that these cold events will not disappear entirely and that we should be prepared for how climate change impacts extreme weather in other ways, such as more frequent wildfires, droughts and severe storms. 

“Studies have shown that while the overall global temperature is rising due to climate change, extreme cold events can still occur and may even become more frequent in certain regions due to the rapid warming of the Arctic,” Dai said. “Global warming also has many other adverse effects besides its impact on cold events. These findings are a good first step to better understanding how the warming climate impacts weather patterns. We plan to continue our analysis for other types of extreme events.” 

Dai is among the most cited scientists in his field with more than 200 published journal articles related to climate science. Among his other recent research includes a 2024 study that linked Arctic sea ice loss to the intensity of El Niño events. 

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Journal

npj Climate and Atmospheric Science

DOI

10.1038/s41612-024-00886-w 

Method of Research

Computational simulation/modeling

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Attribution of a record-breaking cold event in the historically warmest year of 2023 and assessing future risks

Birds breathe in dangerous plastics—and so do we

A UTA study finds high levels of microplastics in bird lungs, raising alarms about the pollution humans inhale daily

University of Texas at Arlington

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“Birds serve as important indicators of environmental conditions,” said UTA's Shane DuBay, who collaborated with researchers from Sichuan University and Chengdu Tianfu International Airport, both in Chengdu, China. “They help us understand the state of the environment and make informed decisions about conservation and pollution control.”

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Credit: UTA

Microscopic plastic pollutants drifting through the air are lodging in the lungs of birds, a new University of Texas at Arlington study finds. Researchers worldwide are increasingly alarmed by how pervasive these harmful particles are in the air humans breathe and the food they eat.

Shane DuBay, an assistant professor of biology at UTA and co-author of the study published in the Journal of Hazardous Materials, said birds were chosen for the study because they are found in almost every corner of the world and often share environments with humans.

“Birds serve as important indicators of environmental conditions,” said DuBay, who collaborated with researchers from Sichuan University and Chengdu Tianfu International Airport, both in Chengdu, China. “They help us understand the state of the environment and make informed decisions about conservation and pollution control.”

DuBay’s team studied 56 different wild birds from 51 distinct species, all sampled from the Tianfu airport in western China. They collected lung samples from each bird and performed two types of chemical analyses.

They used laser direct infrared technology to detect and count microplastics in the birds’ lungs. Pyrolysis gas chromatography-mass-spectrometry helped identify even smaller nanoplastics, which can enter the lungs through the bloodstream. Together, the tests allowed scientists to measure the amount of plastic in the birds’ lungs and determine the specific types of plastics present.

The study found high concentrations of microplastics in bird lungs, with an average of 221 particles per species and 416 particles per gram of lung tissue. The most common types identified were chlorinated polyethylene, used for insulating pipes and wires, and butadiene rubber, a synthetic material in tires.

While no official “safe” level of plastic particles in lung tissue exists, high levels of microplastics have been linked to serious health conditions, including heart disease, cancer, respiratory problems and fertility issues.

“Our research highlights an urgent need to address plastic pollution in our environments, as these contaminants can have far-reaching impacts on ecosystem health, as well as human health,” DuBay said. “Our findings call for further research, funding and action to mitigate the harmful effects of plastic pollution and ensure a healthier environment.”

 

About The University of Texas at Arlington (UTA)

Located in the heart of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, The University of Texas at Arlington is a comprehensive teaching, research, and public service institution dedicated to the advancement of knowledge through scholarship and creative work. With an enrollment of approximately 41,000 students, UT Arlington is the second-largest institution in the UT System. UTA’s combination of outstanding academics and innovative research contributes to its designation as a Carnegie R-1 “Very High Research Activity” institution, a significant milestone of excellence. The University is designated as a Hispanic Serving-Institution and an Asian American Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institution by the U.S. Department of Education and has earned the Seal of Excelencia for its commitment to accelerating Latino student success. The University ranks in the top five nationally for veterans and their families (Military Times, 2024), is No. 4 in Texas for advancing social mobility (U.S. News & World Report, 2025), and is No. 6 in the United States for its undergraduate ethnic diversity (U.S. News & World Report, 2025). UT Arlington’s approximately 270,000 alumni occupy leadership positions at many of the 21 Fortune 500 companies headquartered in North Texas and contribute to the University’s $28.8 billion annual economic impact on Texas.

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Journal

Journal of Hazardous Materials

DOI

10.1016/j.jhazmat.2025.137274 

Method of Research

Observational study

Subject of Research

Animals

Article Title

Assessing microplastic and nanoplastic contamination in bird lungs: evidence of ecological risks and bioindicator potential

Article Publication Date

5-Apr-2025

COI Statement

Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare the following financial interests/personal relationships which may be considered as potential competing interests: Yongjie Wu reports financial support was provided by National Natural Science Foundation of China. Yongjie Wu reports financial support was provided by the Second Tibetan Plateau Scientific Expedition and Research Program. Yongjie Wu reports financial support was provided by the Survey of Wildlife Resources in Key Areas of Tibet. Yongjie Wu reports financial support was provided by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities. The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.