Flexibility isn't the easy burnout fix employers think it is

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Good morning, Broadsheet readers! R. Kelly is convicted of sex trafficking, Simone Biles says she should’ve quit sooner, women are exhausted and burned out. Have a good Tuesday.

– How to beat the burnout. Are women more burned out than they were last year? There’s plenty of anecdotal evidence to answer that question with an emphatic ‘yes,’ but now there’s good data to back it up.

The new annual Women in the Workplace report by McKinsey and LeanIn.org, which surveyed 423 organizations and 65,000 employees, tells us that 42% of women say they often or almost always feel burned out. That’s up from 32% last year and seven percentage points higher than their male peers.

The study points to a few culprits that may be fueling burnout beyond well-documented factors like the collapse of childcare.

Women are carrying out more emotional labor at work than their male peers. Among employees with a female manager, 61% say she checks in on their overall wellbeing, 29% say she helps navigate work/life challenges, and 42% say she tries to ensure a manageable workload, compared to 54%, 24%, and 36% of workers with male managers, respectively.

Women are also up to twice as likely to spend substantial time on diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts that aren’t part of their formal job duties (like organizing events and recruiting from underrepresented groups), but that work is often overlooked. Nearly 70% of companies say DEI is critical, but less than a quarter of firms factor such work into formal performance evaluations.

Microaggressions are also more common among women, and they get worse with seniority. Just over a third of female senior leaders say they’re interrupted or spoken over more than others, compared to 15% of male senior leaders and 24% of female entry-level professionals.

Considering these findings, it’s little surprise that women who manage teams have an even higher rate of feeling burned out—more than 50%—and 40% have considered leaving the workforce or downshifting their careers.

The study does offer a solution to employers, and I’d argue it’s a rather obvious one: “Employees with more flexibility to take time off and step away from work are much less likely to be burned out,” the study says. Employers have caught on; 88% of those surveyed offer flexible hours, up from 27% before 2020.

So why all that burnout?

It seems those ‘flexible hours’ have come with few boundaries, which breeds a culture in which nearly 40% of all employees feel like they’re always-on. Only 1 in 5 employees says their company has encouraged them to ignore non-emergency requests outside of the traditional 9-5, and only 1 in 3 say they’ve gotten guidance on reserving personal time on their calendars. Those small gestures could go a long way. Of employees who feel like they’re ‘always-on’, 57% say they’re burned-out. Among those who don’t feel that way, the burnout rate is 26%.

Claire Zillman
claire.zillman@fortune.com
@clairezillman

The Broadsheet, Fortune’s newsletter for and about the world’s most powerful women, is coauthored by Kristen Bellstrom, Emma Hinchliffe, and Claire Zillman. Today’s edition was curated by Emma Hinchliffe.

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