Manager burnout checks miss employees who are underused, a Denver therapist says

A tired employee with low job satisfaction could have either condition. HRD America reported that fatigue and low job satisfaction show up in both burnout and rust-out ^[7]. The usual manager script, checking whether someone has too much on their plate, addresses only one side of the problem, the report said ^[14]. Burnout, in Verbin's account, comes from chronic workplace stress driven by excessive demands and insufficient resources ^[9]. "It's almost ironic. They share similar symptoms, but they're opposite. One is being underutilized, and the other is being overutilized without enough resources," she said ^[8].

More work does not cure it either. A manager working from the same symptoms can make one of two mistakes: lightening the load of someone who is underused, or piling on tasks without knowing why their interest faded. Verbin warned against the second. "Giving an employee more work without understanding the why behind their disengagement may not address the underlying issue," she said ^[13].

A skeptic would say rust-out is just a new name for the disengagement Gallup already measures ^[1]. Verbin partly agrees. "There's no official clinical diagnosis or clinical language around rust-out. It more so characterizes a type of workplace experience," she said, adding that burnout has a definition from the World Health Organization ^[4]. I think the label matters less than the question it adds. A check-in that asks only about workload puts every flat employee in the burnout column.

Gallup's survey counts the engaged ^[1]. As reported, it does not divide everyone else into the overloaded and the underused. Active engagement in the first half of 2026 was 5 percentage points below the 2020 high ^[1] and has barely moved since 2025 ^[2]. Nobody knows yet how much of that gap comes from underuse. The clinical case comes from Verbin, a licensed clinical social worker who founded Wellcore Healing in Denver ^[3].

The consequence that lasts longest falls to whoever decides how much AI goes into a role. HRD America's report argues that the time AI saves an employee can come at the cost of the work that held their interest ^[11]. The hours saved show up in the quarter the tool goes in. If Verbin is right, the engagement cost shows up later, across the whole team. "There's probably reduced initiative, reduced collaboration. You're going to see disengagement between different team members," she said ^[15].