Canadian workplaces lose 46 days a year to burnout with 62 per cent of employees also burnt out, according to findings from Manulife and Robert Half
New findings from two separate organizations have reinforced that Canadian workers are burning out at a pace that's causing benefits and HR experts to ring the alarm on mental health and workplace productivity.
A recent Manulife report found employers lose the equivalent of 46 days of productivity each year to fatigue, stress and mental health issues roughly 3 per cent from absences and another 19 per cent from people being physically present but operating well below full capacity.
"Employees overall are showing up to work, they're showing up physically, but productivity is negatively being impacted by fatigue called stress. Call it burnout. Just overall mental health issues," said Ashesh Desai, head of group benefits at Manulife. “Employees are just not as productive as they could be. For employers, this highlights an overall opportunity to make access available and make it easier to find that access to that care.”
Desai doesn’t see a single cause behind the productivity hit. Rather, he believes that it's the accumulation of pressures - mental health strain, burnout, poor sleep, long commutes, and the constant pull between personal and professional demands - that wears people down over time.
Additionally, much of it doesn't surface in obvious ways, he notes. Employees aren't necessarily missing work because they're at their desks while juggling parent-teacher meetings, childcare logistics and the ordinary stresses of daily life. Those compounding pressures, he suggests, quietly chip away at how fully someone can engage during the workday, even when attendance looks fine on paper.
“What these findings tell us is that there is an opportunity to do better, to support employees downstream,” he said, noting that while many employers have already built a comprehensive benefits package, the work doesn’t stop there.
“There's impact to the productivity and people are not showing up at their best," he said, noting once the right package is in place, the harder challenge is making sure employees know what's available and can reach it without friction, particularly at the moments when they need it most.
“When you're not as productive, you are impacting the people around you. You are impacting the output of the organization. It's important for organizations to recognize that this is impacting how they show up in the community as well,” said Desai.
"Are you doing all that you can do to increase awareness, increase utilization at the right time, and removing barriers to access?" he added.
Meanwhile, when Robert Half ran its burnout survey in late 2023, 33 per cent of respondents reported feeling burned out. By late 2024, that figure had climbed to 47 per cent. Now, the latest read, in early 2026, puts it at 62 per cent.
The findings also notably come after TELUS Health released their quarterly Mental Health Index which found that 31 per cent say their mental health is negatively impacting work productivity, 27 per cent feel depressed, 14 per cent do not feel optimistic about their future, and 10 per cent of workers cite poor psychological health.
Tara Parry, director of permanent services at Robert Half, calls the burnout surge, “the kitchen sink of problems,” noting it’s the result of three years of compounding pressure with no relief valve. She points to a mix of geopolitical uncertainty, economic anxiety and employers who’ve responded by quietly declining to backfill roles after natural attrition as the key factors.
"That just floors me that we've almost doubled it over the course of those three years," said Parry. “It's just compounding on top of itself. Between lack of hiring, teams feeling under resourced, external pressures and internal pressures around productivity and efficiency, it all just starts to add up.”
Parry sees burnout as a systemic workforce risk, not just a wellness issue, notably as Robert Half's data also found that 27 per cent of respondents tied their burnout to feeling stuck - either because they see no path to grow inside their current organization or because switching employers feels too risky in a tight market.
That stagnation, she warns, has a shelf life as short- and long-term disability claims have climbed sharply in recent years, surpassing even Covid-era levels, and she draws a direct line to burnout.
“Benefit providers really need to be encouraging companies to hire because it's the benefit providers who are paying out these short- and long-term disability settlements because people are so burnt out at work," she said, emphasizing Canadian employers, in her view, have leaned too hard on one cost lever.
"Canadian employers need to give their head a little bit of a shake if they feel like the only way they can manage their [profit and loss] is on their payroll spend," she added.
She also pitches a structural fix that gets little airtime in benefits conversations, pointing to build coverage for vacations into the staffing plan, using contractors or designated floater roles so workloads don't pile up while someone is away.
"You can't keep running with tight teams or it's just a pressure cooker waiting to explode," she said. "We cannot control the geopolitical environment. We cannot control the economic environment, but we can control our internal environment.”
To that end, Desai lays out a three-step framework for plan sponsors, emphasizing they need to ensure the benefits package reflects what the workforce needs. Not a generic offering, but one shaped by listening to employees and understanding that no two workplaces face the same pressures.
Second, he acknowledged the closing of the awareness gap, noting all too often, employees learn what's available during onboarding and then forget by the time they need it months later.
Lastly, he believes employers need to strip away the friction, underscoring digital platforms matter here because they replace the experience of sifting through multiple webpages and booklets with something employees can navigate quickly at the moment they need care, whether that's counselling, virtual healthcare on evenings and weekends, or specialized support for women's and family health.
According to Desai, more organizations are also putting real dollars behind mental health benefits, both by increasing spending limits and by adding new tools like EFAP counselling, virtual healthcare and specialized family health programs.
But the bigger challenge, he suggests, is prompting people to act, reminding them at the right moment that the benefit exists, how much coverage they have, and how to put it to work.
“How do you bring that to the employee at the right time? It's just asking the question and recognizing that there is an opportunity to do more and to support people,” he said.
