Written by Kat Kibben

Katrina Kibben is a nationally recognized expert in recruiting and job post transformation. As founder and CEO of Three Ears Media, they’ve trained thousands of recruiters to write better job postings, helping organizations reduce time-to-fill, lower costs, and remove bias. With 15+ years of experience working with companies like Monster.com and Randstad Worldwide, Katrina blends deep industry expertise with practical, actionable advice that drives real results.

A LinkedIn Top Voice on Hiring, Katrina’s insights have been featured in The New York Times and Forbes. They’re also the author of This Was All An Accident, sharing leadership lessons from life on the road.

Connect with Kat on LinkedIn.

When I worked in corporate America, I could always blame my boss for the burnout. They sent emails late at night, so I assumed that if I wanted to be the boss, I would also respond to emails at night. To be fair, no one ever told me they expected the 20-minute response time at all hours of the work week. I guess I just did some math of my own. Responding quickly became a benchmark of my success, then it almost killed my career.

COVID didn’t help. A year of sitting in the house left me more tied to my phone than ever. Even with all this time to seemingly do nothing, I made up all these rules that even went beyond my inbox hitting zero. It was everything about work — even my schedule. I would be at my desk by 9 and stay there until 5. But why? I never asked. I just did it. I had no one to blame four years into my business when the burnout hit me hard. I wanted to quit everything.

It took the unusual experience of moving into a van and traveling for a year where I couldn’t respond immediately to realize it. Just like I made up the rule about the response time, I made up all the rules about work.

The sum of that equation? A burnout I couldn’t kick for several years and something I’m still working to recover from today three years later.

Why does workplace culture ignore rest?

In any job, whether you work for yourself or a global corporation, it’s really hard to see the importance of rest when you’re busy navigating all the rules. Rest is not something taught or enabled at work. It hasn’t ever been part of the profit margin. No one even talks about rest, let alone plans for people to take rest.

If you do hear about CEOs incorporating rest? People treat it as something novel and unique, even though it’s common sense that we need rest to do our best work. We are all burned out and craving anyone to give us permission to rest. Over the last five years, the number of people reporting burnout has more than doubled every other year since 2020. Recent surveys from Mercer say that 80% of employees are at risk of burnout.

But the scale of burnout isn’t as important as the consequences for the most sacred profit-margin-maker: your brain. When a brain is burned out, it creates a cognitive load that takes up a lot of room. Research suggests that lack of mental space to process stimuli instead of stress makes people less flexible. They generate fewer unique ideas and have less problem-solving capacity.

Oh, and it’s not easy to just bounce back from that. It takes more than three years to heal your brain. Yes you read that right. More on that here. We can’t keep treating rest like a reward we earn and accumulate in PTO hours. If you insist on some bottom line, it’s clear: less brain space, less profit. 

Burnout solutions that don’t require more work

So, why aren’t companies trying to beat burnout? My guess is that there haven’t been a lot of practical solutions presented to companies that aren’t on the Fortune 500 list. Rest perks like nap rooms and therapy have always felt like a Silicon Valley service, not something anyone could do anywhere. 

But rest-related benefits don’t just belong in tech. Across every industry, rest is going to help with burnout and employee Net Promoter Score. But those are just your leading indicators it’s working. The lag indicators are the ones that will save you a lot of money and time: more referrals, less turnover, shorter time to fill, and lower benefit costs.

When I say rest-related, I’m not just talking about cots in some break room. That’s creepy. Maybe it’s a weeklong shutdown in the summer where everyone takes the week off. That means everyone, by the way. A $100 self-care stipend. This also might include flexible work arrangements. Just remember, healing burnout isn’t one size fits all.

The best part? I can’t emphasize enough how much people love these benefits. One of my friends gets $100 for the gym every month, and you would think this employer had bought her a car. She talks about it that much. Just don’t wait until your team starts buying up vans to realize everyone is burned out.

For more unfiltered stories and hard-won lessons that transformed my own approach to work and well-being, check out my new book, “The Bounce Back Factor: A Leader’s Guide To Liking Yourself While Leading Your People.”