As it always does, December seemed to arrive faster than anyone expected. With it came the telltale signs of the weirdest month on our work calendars: less energy, fewer new ideas, and more empty chairs.
To the casual observer, it certainly looks and feels as if people are checked out, simply waiting for the calendar to flip. It is a familiar scene that triggers a familiar response from leadership. We often reach for the "easy" fixes: pep talks, group emails designed to re-energize the troops, and rallying cries to "run to the finish."
But this is how misdiagnoses happen.
Framing end-of-year fatigue as seasonal laziness or a motivation gap is a mistake. If it were simply a motivation problem, it wouldn’t repeat like clockwork every holiday season. Explaining it away as a motivation deficit is convenient because the solution—“everyone just needs to get motivated again”—is simple. It gives our organizational systems a pass.
The Real Culprit: Systemic Burnout
The reality is far more complex. When the actual problem is burnout, leadership decisions must be factored in and held to account. It is tempting to choose the explanation that requires the least structural change, but avoiding the hard truth only perpetuates the cycle.
“While it's easy to say that burnout is a failure of resilience, that's rarely the case,” says Amy Leneker, a leadership consultant. “Burnout is a signal that the way work has been designed isn't working, and it often results from having too much to do and too little time to do it. The holidays exacerbate this by adding more to already full plates. That end-of-the-year time crunch reveals what’s already true the rest of the year: Most of us are operating in systems that set us up to fail.”
The Weight of Invisible Labor
As is often observed in many romantic partnerships, women frequently bear the brunt of this burnout due to invisible labor.
“Leaders misdiagnose burnout as a motivation problem because they're not looking for how they are contributing to it,” says Jamie Martin, an executive coach. “It's easier to point to the employee. But burnout happens when the invisible work becomes bigger than the visible work, when employees have to reverse-engineer what success looks like to their boss and are constantly wondering if they're going the right direction.”
Martin notes that this compounds for women during the holidays, as they often take on more invisible work outside the office while simultaneously covering gaps inside the office.
The Slow Erosion of Engagement
Yakov Filippenko, founder and CEO of the networking app Intch, points out that exit interviews across industries reveal a consistent theme. Burnout rarely stems from individual weakness; rather, it is the result of a systemic imbalance in workload, resources, and support.
“Burnout often comes first,” Filippenko explains. “Not as a dramatic collapse, but as slow erosion. People push through workload spikes until their energy disappears, then their motivation, then their sense of purpose. When those conditions persist, even high performers begin drifting long before they consciously consider leaving.”
This drift shows up in micro-signals: deprioritizing once-important tasks, opting out of discussions because there’s too much going on, or quietly concluding that nothing will improve.
The Cure: Clarity and Vulnerability
The solution to this annual slump isn’t complicated, but it requires intentionality.
Martin suggests leaders must sit down with their teams to uncover what isn’t visible to them. “Get explicit agreement about what success looks like from the top level of their job to the project level,” she advises. “Not once a year in a performance review. Every month. Every quarter. Every one-on-one. Without this, you're not building trust; you're building exhaustion.”
Furthermore, leaders must abandon the "defend and convince" mentality. Instead, Filippenko says, “A manager’s task is to listen without ego and treat dissatisfaction as a data point about the system, not a personal critique.”
Sarah O’Brien, a psychotherapist and wellness expert, emphasizes that we must design workplaces that prioritize humanity over productivity. “There needs to be an understanding that productivity and focus ebb and flow. People are not robots.”
O’Brien encourages leaders to lean into curiosity rather than judgment. This means taking accountability for lack of clarity or unreasonable expectations and being honest about their own stressors. “This is not shirking responsibility,” she says. “It's demonstrating authentic disclosure about [one’s] own reflection and reaction to workplace demands.”
The new year provides a unique opportunity to leave behind what isn’t working. As Leneker notes, preventing burnout requires clarifying what success actually looks like, cleaning up role confusion, and honoring boundaries around time and capacity.
Leaders, managers, and employees all have a role to play. It is only when we stop blaming "seasonal laziness" and start addressing the systemic cracks in our foundations that we can actually fix the problem.