How to Spot Burnout Before It Costs You a Resignation

By the time a resignation letter lands on your desk, the decision was usually made weeks earlier. What looks like a sudden departure is almost always the end of a slow, visible pattern — long days, disappearing breaks, work creeping into weekends — that nobody was tracking closely enough to catch.

Six Signals Worth Watching

  • Long hours — consistent days well past a normal shift length
  • Missed breaks — no meaningful pause across an entire tracked day
  • Weekend work — activity logged on days that should be off
  • Late nights — work starting before 6am or continuing past 11pm
  • Declining productivity — a real drop against someone’s own baseline, not a generic average
  • Weekly hours over limit — sustained overload across multiple weeks, not just one busy sprint

No single signal on its own means much — everyone has one long week. What matters is the combination, sustained over a rolling window, compared against each person’s own normal, not a company-wide average that flattens out real outliers.

A burnout score isn’t a verdict. It’s a prompt to have a conversation before the conversation becomes an exit interview.

Turning Signals Into a Number

TrackDots rolls these six signals into a 14-day rolling risk score, classifying each employee as High, Medium, Watch, or All Clear — recalculated daily as new activity comes in. Every flagged employee comes with a plain-language recommendation, like “consider checking in” or “monitor this week,” not just a red number with no context.

Thresholds for what counts as a long day or a late night are fully configurable per organization. See Burnout Detection →

The Point Isn’t the Score

The score exists to start a conversation a manager might otherwise have missed — not to replace one. The best outcome of a burnout flag is a five-minute check-in that never would have happened otherwise.

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *