Burnout from
Emotional Labor

Background Context

Nonprofit organizations exist to serve communities facing the most complex social challenges. Yet behind every successful program is a workforce carrying the emotional weight of crisis, trauma and systemic inequality. For frontline staff and nonprofit leaders, this emotional labor is deeply rooted in the daily realities of the field.

Unlike many sectors, nonprofit professionals are often expected to extend their roles beyond their original job scope. As BPM Insight said, "Your staff members juggle multiple responsibilities beyond their job descriptions while watching peers in other sectors earn significantly more for less stressful work." This imbalance of a high emotional demand with limited financial and structural support has become a defining feature of the nonprofit experience.

At the same time, the external environment has made this work even more difficult. "This crisis has been exacerbated by the current climate of policy changes and budget cuts that have limited the sector's ability to operate," the Johnson Center said. As funding becomes more restrictive and regulations grow more complex, nonprofit teams are asked to do more with less while still maintaining the same level of compassion, responsiveness and mission focus.

Across industries, employee well-being has emerged as a strategic priority, as the Johnson Center said. But for social impact organizations, it is not optional. Without healthy staff, organizations cannot deliver consistent, ethical or effective services.

The JAMA Health Forum also attributed the normalized burnout rates of physicians to the status quo of workers expecting to handle emotional situations while disregarding their own. The nonprofit sector also faces emotional labor being treated as limitless when in reality the system itself becomes untenable.

Burnout is not simply fatigue. The National Library of Medicine explained, "Burnout is a negative emotional reaction to one's job…It is a state of exhaustion and emotional depletion that is dysfunctional for the employee and leads to absenteeism, turnover, and reduced job performance." These outcomes are increasingly visible across nonprofit organizations.

The human cost is deeply personal. An interview published by SpringerLink shows that individuals aren't able to cope in their positions. Their statement reflects the silent endurance that many nonprofit professionals carry.

For leaders, the pressure is equally intense. As Neya Global puts it, "Non-profit leaders face a complex interplay of emotional, ethical, and structural pressures that distinguish their stress landscape from that of corporate or public-sector leaders." They must balance funding realities, staff well-being, community needs and organizational survival. They often perform most of these tasks without the infrastructure or support systems common in other sectors.

This convergence of emotional labor, resource scarcity and rising expectations has created a critical moment for nonprofit organizations. Burnout is no longer an individual issue, it is an organizational risk. Addressing it requires not only awareness but intentional systems that support the people who power the mission.

Problem Statement

Burnout in the nonprofit sector has reached a level that threatens organizational support, service quality and mission impact. This is not a short-term workforce fluctuation, it's a structural crisis. "When 95% of nonprofit leaders express concern about burnout and only 45% of employees plan to stay in their current roles, you're facing more than a retention challenge; you're confronting an existential threat to organizational capacity," BPM Insight said.

Multiple national studies have confirmed the depth of this crisis. "32% of respondents said that 'providing for staff wellness' was a major or minor challenge for their organization," the Johnson Center said. Yet despite widespread awareness, most organizations lack the resources, infrastructure or strategic frameworks to respond effectively. The Johnson Center elaborated that nonprofits struggle investing in the well-being of their staff because it takes a toll on their funding as well as energy put into other challenges they face. This mismatch between demand and capacity has created a cycle of burnout, turnover and organizational instability.

What Leaders Are Seeing

Across nonprofit organizations, burnout shows up in visible, costly ways. It can show up as chronic vacancies, increased sick time and absenteeism, declining morale, loss of institutional knowledge, and lower service quality and client dissatisfaction. Burnout, according to the Stanford Social Innovation Review (SSIR), is formally defined as "feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion, increased mental distance from one's job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one's job; and reduced professional efficacy." Burnout is classified as an occupational phenomenon according to the International Classification of Diseases.

The effects of burnout are not only emotional, but also cognitive and operational. The American Psychology Association said it "can impair workers' short-term memory, attention and other cognitive processes that are essential for daily work activities." De Gruyter Brill, a source dedicated to research, notes that nonprofit work deals with forming relationships and involves frequent, emotionally charged client interactions. This level of emotional exposure without adequate support leads directly to compassion fatigue and disengagement.

Emotional Labor Meets Structural Constraints

Burnout is not caused by individual weakness or lack of resilience. Research consistently shows it is a collective, organizational phenomenon. "Instead of pressuring already-stressed individuals to fix themselves, true wellness requires organization-level interventions," the SSIR said.

Nonprofit staff perform intense emotional labor. It can be clear to see how emotional labor in relationship-driven occupations can lead to high rates of burnout. "Emotional dissonance is conceptualized as a conflict between felt and displayed emotions," the National Library of Medicine (NLM) said. "Employees gradually begin to experience burnout when their capacity for emotional dissonance is exhausted."

When resources are depleted for staff, employees learn to push their needs and emotions down. When emotional needs are suppressed, it creates stress. The NLM explained that stress is due to suppression from emotional demands in the workforce.

Stress also compounds in individuals. A 2024 study the Johnson Center referenced found "22% of nonprofit employees lived in households unable to afford necessities like housing and healthcare." Outside factors that contribute to stress also contribute to workplace burnout. Financial instability is a large stressor for many adults.

While individuals also suffer from stress, so do organizations. The Johnson Center also said that many organizations have had to shut down because of "unexpected shifts in funding." Many organization leaders are unable to identify additional financial support for their organization.

Why Current Approaches Fail

Most organizations try to solve burnout as a challenge individuals must tackle themselves. Some solutions they provide are access to mindfulness apps, wellness workshops and resilience trainings. While helpful, these approaches ignore the real drivers of a deeper issue. Research conducted by the SSIR showed that a fair, transparent and purpose-focused workplace can ease the burdens of burnout. Without addressing workload clarity, decision transparency and feedback culture, these surface-level fixes cannot succeed. As Goodera, a volunteering program, found, "Employees who strongly agree they can meet performance expectations are 70% less likely to report burnout."

The Cost of Inaction

Healthcare offers a warning when it comes to what happens to people who experience burnout. "More than half of US physicians report at least 1 symptom of burnout—nearly twice the rate of the general working population," JAMA Health Forum said. Multiple studies have narrowed down three drivers of burnout. When pressure to care for patients is high with little to no resources, expectations to engage in activities that seem irrelevant to their job and an inability to meet needs of patients all contribute to burnout.

The emotional consequence is that physicians harbor resentment for their job or feel disconnected from their work. Workers who find it hard to work emotionally sustainably, they fail "to support professional autonomy, reasonable work hours, and healthy relationships," JAMA Health Forum said.

Nonprofits face a parallel moment. Burnout erodes trust, weakens culture, increases risk and ultimately undermines mission delivery. When staff leave, services suffer. When leaders burn out, strategy stalls. When organizations ignore the warning signs, they risk becoming intolerable. Burnout is not just an HR issue, it is a strategic leadership challenge that requires system-level solutions.

Proposed Solutions

Burnout Is a Design Problem

Burnout persists not because nonprofit leaders lack compassion. It happens because most organizations were never structurally designed to sustain the level of emotional labor required by the work. As pressures rise, this misalignment deepens. The Johnson Center reiterates how stress can lead to strain on the organization, emphasizing that infrastructure, staffing, supplies and service needs will tend to increase and so will the need to combat emotional fatigue.

The solution is not to ask staff to "be more resilient." The solution is to redesign the systems in which they work. The Johnson Center stated, "Organizations must not forget the lessons of previous crises: people and groups working on the frontlines of emergent situations need rest, care, and resources."

Burnout is preventable when organizations treat employee well-being as a measurable, strategic and cultural priority supported by leadership, systems and continuous feedback. Organizations should have a few guiding principles to help create the infrastructure to help alleviate burnout. Here are some proposed principles that research has proven they can be effective.

Together, these principles resolve the systemic drivers of burnout by replacing silence with visibility, overload with structural assistance and cultural neglect with leadership accountability. Emotional labor is no longer left unmanaged. Instead, it is recognized, mounted and balanced through intentional systems. In practice, this framework is activated through a continual improvement cycle. Organizations can measure staff experience, interpret the data to identify risk patterns, intervene through workload and workflow adjustments, equip managers as well-being champions, normalize recovery as part of performance expectations and repeat the process quarterly. Rather than waiting for burnout to reach a crisis point, leaders use real-time insights to make small, strategic changes that protect both people and mission. Through this system, nonprofit organizations can move from survival mode to sustainability, ensuring that those who serve others are also supporting themselves.

How Pulse Aligns with Solutions

Pulse For Good exists to empower mission-driven organizations with real-time, actionable insight into the lived experience of the people they serve and the teams that serve them. Pulse For Good is not a traditional survey vendor, Pulse is a systems partner that helps leaders identify, understand and act on emerging risks before they become crises. Pulse's mission aligns with the broader understanding that burnout cannot be addressed solely through wellness programs or individual resilience. Pulse For Good understands it requires ongoing measurement, structural redesign and leadership accountability.

Pulse For Good's credibility is rooted in more than technology, it is grounded in practical experience and deep sector engagement. Since 2015, Pulse For Good has collected more than 375,000 feedback responses across hundreds of locations, transforming how organizations connect with clients, staff and volunteers. These data gathered through autonomous feedback systems like kiosks and online surveys have provided real insights that drive organizational change and improve service delivery.

The team's expertise extends beyond software. Co-founders Blake Kohlner, Remington Rainey and Marc Weaver have authored Candid, a book that guides nonprofits on building feedback systems that provide honest, actionable insight. They strive to help organizations move away from superficial feedback mechanisms toward deeper, persistent improvement systems.

Pulse For Good's mission is directly aligned with the solutions framework proposed in this paper. The sustainable workforce system outlined in the previous section depends on steady, structured insight into staff and client experience. Pulse For Good operationalizes core components of this framework by enabling organizations to measure well-being, detect early signs of strain and prioritize strategic action. The mission's emphasis on respectful, anonymous feedback mirrors the research-backed understanding that burnout arises from systemic dysfunction, not personal deficiency, and must be mitigated through trust, transparency and responsive leadership.

What distinguishes Pulse For Good from more generic engagement tools is its focus on real-world use in high emotional demand environments. The platform is designed to capture feedback safely and anonymously from populations who may be hesitant to share openly, including staff bearing emotional labor, clients in vulnerable situations, and volunteers navigating complex service settings. It enables organizations to gather honest input without taxing already overextended teams.

Pulse For Good doesn't simply aggregate survey data. Its analytics and dashboards translate raw data into visible feedback that can be used as actionable insights, which help leaders prioritize interventions, track trends over time and close feedback loops by communicating actions back to staff and clients.

Serving a wide range of nonprofit and human service organizations, Pulse For Good amplifies voice and insight not as a replacement for human connection nor a means of surveillance. Its ethical design prioritizes anonymity, confidentiality and respectful engagement ensuring that feedback promotes trust rather than fear. Pulse emphasizes psychologically safe feedback for clients and staff.

Benefits and Impact

In mission-driven organizations, success has traditionally been measured by outputs such as clients served, programs delivered or dollars raised. In today's nonprofit scene, success is measured by quality, not quantity. True impact must also include the sustainability of the people doing the work. A healthy organization is not one that merely survives crisis, but one that adapts, retains its talent and protects its capacity to serve.

Under an endurable workforce, success means staff who feel supported, not depleted. Success shows leaders who make decisions using real-time insight. Organizations that grow stronger through change are another indicator of success.

When burnout is addressed systemically, organizations begin to function differently. Feedback becomes a strategic asset, culture becomes a stabilizing force and people feel invested rather than expendable. "Training, mentorship, and growth opportunities show employees they're valued and help combat disengagement—a significant cause of nonprofit burnout," Goodera said.

Organizations that prioritize learning and developing through stipends, goal-setting and internal skill-sharing create environments where employees feel valued. These cultural shifts directly improve retention, collaboration and service continuity. Goodera reports on a study finding that "nonprofits with strong internal cultures were 50% more likely to retain staff over three years." This retention reduces recruitment costs, preserves institutional knowledge and strengthens program outcomes.

Human Impact

The benefits of sustainable systems extend far beyond productivity. When emotional labor is endorsed through meaningful structures, individuals experience real psychological relief. "When teams feel seen, heard, and supported, they're far more likely to stay committed, collaborative, and well. A workplace where people feel safe to speak up, are appreciated for their work, and can share openly helps prevent burnout and keeps teams together," Goodera said.

The National Library of Medicine confirms that organizational support directly improves mental health outcomes in ways that build resilience and mindfulness among employees. "Cultivating resilience and mindfulness in human service professionals may assist in preventing psychological distress, burnout and secondary traumatic stress," the NLM said. These shifts restore energy, engagement and purpose, allowing staff to remain present in their work-life balance.

Strategic Impact

From a leadership and board perspective, addressing burnout is not a wellness initiative, it is a strategic imperative that directly affects organizational stability, credibility and long-term performance. Organizations that embed supportable workforce systems into their operations build resilience that allows them to withstand funding shifts, staffing changes and external crises without compromising service delivery. When leaders can see emerging risks in real time, they are able to adapt more quickly, allocate resources more effectively and make decisions that are grounded in the lived realities of their teams rather than delayed data or assumptions.

Measurable Indicators of Success

The impact of an exemplary workforce strategy becomes visible through consistent improvements in organizational health. As early signals of burnout are identified and addressed, organizations begin to see higher engagement, stronger retention, reduced emotional exhaustion and improved trust in leadership. From the perspective of Pulse For Good's dashboard systems, leaders will be able to tell a general improvement in their service and how clients feel about it. An overall higher score will indicate the organization is succeeding in implementing positive changes. As the Stanford Social Innovation Review noted, "Early intervention offers the possibility to mitigate damage." When staff experience meaningful change in response to their feedback, confidence grows and risk declines.

Comparative Framing

Organizations that operate without systems to address burnout often remain stuck reacting only after staff have disengaged or left. In contrast, organizations that adopt an endurable approach to utilize feedback to decrease burnout rates will see diligent improvement and growth. Emotional exhaustion will be replaced by psychological safety. Organizations that react to crises will evolve into feedback systems that show signs of crisis before it gets to the point of real alarm. Workforce depletion gives way to long-term sustainability.

The SSIR said that making targeted decisions are "more nimble and can happen more quickly versus trying to change an entire organizational culture at once." Rather than attempting to transform everything at once, leaders can take small steps that are high-impact adjustments in the end.